Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 26th March 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

1: Before Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“Purpose: improvement of bus passenger services(1) The purpose of this Act is to improve the performance, accessibility and quality of bus passenger services in Great Britain.(2) The Secretary of State must, in taking any actions under the provisions of this Act, have regard to this purpose.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would place a duty on the Secretary of State to have regard to the purpose of the Act, namely the improved performance, quality and accessibility of bus passenger services in Great Britain.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the amendments in this group fall into three parts. Amendment 1 stands on its own and Amendments 2 to 8 work together to a single effect and will be dealt with as such. Amendment 61, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, seeks clarification. All I will say on it is that I look forward to hearing both what she has to say and what the Minister has to say in reply. I will attempt to be brief, given the hour and the amount of business that we have to get through.

Amendments 2 to 8 give me an opportunity to thank a group of people who have been largely ignored in debates on this Bill: the private companies, entrepreneurs, capitalists and workers—the people who invest their money in providing a service for this country and who are being simply rubbed out as businesses by this Government and will become merely servants of the state, not entrepreneurs or businessmen, as the Minister was when he ran a private bus company. They are not to have those opportunities but simply to be wiped out. The work they do should be acknowledged because they have worked diligently for us over the years.

We are told that what we will get in its place is something better, run by the Government, and we are pointed to places such as London for examples. In London, when the subsidies run out—there are hundreds of millions of pounds of subsidies to operate the buses—we see routes sometimes being cut altogether or having a cut in their frequency. This group of amendments would allow private bus companies to continue to operate without seeking a special permit so as to meet demand. I do not intend to press this group of amendments to a Division. I am sure that the Minister will explain that it is all going to be sunny and wonderful under the state-managed regime, but it is not. We know that from our experience of when the subsidies run out.

In that connection—the notion that it is all going to be better because the Government, or, in this case, local transport authorities, will run the buses—I turn to Amendment 1. There is nothing in the Bill, nor have the Government even made the case, as to why it is going to be better, what the purpose of this Bill is, what it sets out to achieve and what the prime focus is. We know that the unions want to see this happen. We know that many, often Labour-run, local authorities want to see this happen, but they should not be the heart and the driver of the way we manage our public transport services. The heart and the driver should be the passengers, in this case bus passengers. Amendment 1 gives us a purpose to the Bill and puts bus passengers at the heart of it.

I am grateful, incidentally, for an earlier amendment, now withdrawn, from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, which reminded me that accessibility needed to be included alongside performance and quality of service with regard to bus passengers. That has improved the amendment and gives us what we see today. I strongly believe that this Bill needs such a purpose. The Secretary of State needs to be required to put the passenger at the heart of the Bill. There is no sign that that is the intention at the moment. There are only promises and pledges, but nothing in writing. With that, I beg to move.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for recent meetings with him and his officials. I have tabled Amendment 61 in this group and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for his kind comments about my previous amendment—I thought his revised one looked a little familiar.

Amendment 61 is not only about disabled access to buses, which is why I wanted to debate it right at the start of Report. Rather, it would confirm the importance of the Equality Act 2010 in relation to bus operators, local transport authorities and, of course, passengers. The Equality Act 2010 sets out, in Section 149, the public sector equality duty of public bodies delivering services to people. Anyone under it must have due regard to the need, and take steps to advance, equality of opportunity, not only for disabled passengers.

In this Bill, it is the local transport authorities which are under the PSED directly and plan, implement and monitor bus services in their area, as outlined in Section 108 of the Transport Act 2000. LTAs’ responsibilities are not limited to contracting for certain franchised bus services but include the responsibility for planning services for all their passengers, including the non-franchised. That does not mean that LTAs run the free market commercial bus routes, but they must ensure that everyone in their area has usable bus services.

In Committee, the Minister said that the regulation for public sector vehicles—PSVs—includes the duty to make reasonable adjustments. However, in practice, it is often a “best efforts” provision, leaving many disabled passengers frustrated when they cannot access a bus service. The actual compulsory provision includes wheelchair spaces, announcements and visual displays on the next stop, et cetera, and is way stronger than just reasonable adjustments.

I have continued to meet some pushback in meetings with government officials outside your Lordships’ House on the formal powers that all PSVs have to comply with. There seems to be something of a mindset that the commercial bus services are not included, but it is clear that they are covered by the Equality Act, which does not say that the definition is about commissioned or franchised services; it is any bus service that qualifies as a PSV, and its work must be monitored under another part of the Equality Act—the PSED—by the local transport authority, which will assess whether bus services in its area are meeting the needs of the people.

I have checked the case of FirstGroup Plc v Doug Paulley. The Supreme Court’s judgment, delivered in January 2017, sets out in paragraphs 11 and 12 the position that the bus operator had

“failed to comply with its duties under the Equality Act”

and confirmed that it was a public service vehicle under the Public Service Vehicles Accessibility Regulations 2000. The House of Commons Transport Select Committee’s report, Access Denied: Rights Versus Reality in Disabled People’s Access to Transport, published last week, explains in paragraphs 10 to 17 the entirety of the law, including how the Equality Act—and within that, the PSED and the PSV section—and the PSV regulations I mentioned all fit together, as well as retained Regulation (EU) No. 181/2011.

The key to all this is the Equality Act, and my amendment simply restates that, as barrister Catherine Casserley said in evidence to the Commons Transport Select Committee, rights to accessible transport

“should be enforced in the same way as any health and safety requirement. As part of any operation, any business has to comply with a range of obligations. These should be no different”.

The Select Committee concluded that, despite the legal framework, much needs to happen to improve compliance and practice on a daily basis. Disabled passengers agree. We need to remind bus operators and LTAs that the Equality Act duties are at the heart of provision for truly accessible bus services. It needs to be in the Bill.

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Finally, I note the noble Lord’s comments on the importance of recording incidents both in and outside buses. Some 96% of buses now have CCTV, which is a great fillip for both bus drivers and passengers, ensuring that crime and anti-social behaviour is recorded and properly dealt with. In addition, the department’s bus and coach safety best practice guidance was updated last year to ensure that, alongside CCTV, there is nationwide best practice regarding security and anti-social behaviour incidents.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord; I listened carefully to what he said. On Amendment 1, he says that we can trust the Government that performance, accessibility and quality of service for bus passengers are safe in their hands and those of local transport authorities, and that this does not need to be in the Bill. Yet, when one looks at Marshalled List, there are half a dozen—welcome—amendments on accessibility. Why are they there? They are there because the Government forgot about accessibility when they drafted the Bill. They are there because of the work of the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Grey-Thompson, and others, who, in Committee, put this issue right at the heart of the discussion.

The truth is that there are a number of drivers influencing the Government in their direction on bus policy. They include the unions, local authorities—many of which are Labour or left-wing led—and the passengers. But the passengers should not have to compete with other parties. As I and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, have said, passengers’ interests should be at the heart of the Bill. For that reason, I wish to test the opinion of the House on Amendment 1.

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Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

9: Before Clause 9, insert the following new Clause—
“Franchising statementIn section 123A of the Transport Act 2000, after subsection (1) insert—“(1A) The power in subsection (1) cannot be exercised until the franchising authority, or two or more franchising authorities acting jointly, has published a statement, subject to the requirement in subsection (1B), stating—(a) their objectives in making the franchising scheme, and(b) their reasons and evidence for believing that the making of such a scheme is the best option for achieving those objectives.(1B) It is a requirement that a statement in subsection (1A) must be published before the franchising authority complies with the requirements in sections 123B to 123G.””Member's explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that before initiating the formal franchising process under sections 123B to 123G of the Transport Act 2000, franchising authorities must first publish a statement outlining their objectives, reasons, and supporting evidence for believing that franchising is the best option to achieve their aims.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, this group consists of three amendments that are sufficiently related to merit being included in one group but are each distinct from each other, and each requires a degree of explanation that, given the hour, I shall try to keep as short as possible, and I hope I will do a sufficiently good job at explaining what their purpose is.

Amendment 9 carries forward the notion of accountability that was contained in Amendment 1 relating to the purpose of the Bill. Amendment 1 related to the Secretary of State. Amendment 9 would place upon a duty upon a local transport authority that was considering embarking on a franchising proposal to make a statement as to what their objectives were in doing so. The franchising process itself is set out in some detail as a result of the amendments here to the Transport Act. I have no quarrel with the process, which is quite elaborate and involves half a dozen steps, including an external audit. It starts when a local transport authority, singly or jointly, decides to start it, and it concludes when that local transport authority decides whether or not to make the scheme. It is perfectly lawful for the local transport authority, having gone through all its process, to reach the conclusion that it should not make the scheme and not therefore proceed with franchising. But at no point does the local transport authority have to say to the public, although it may do as a matter of politics and local communications, what its objective is in doing this, what success is going to look like or what it is trying to achieve. Amendment 9 requires that. I think that is very sensible, and should be welcomed by the Minister, so the public know exactly what their local authority is embarking on and with what purpose.

Amendment 12 relates to the effect of the franchising scheme on incumbent private bus operators, which are companies that have staff and that have to make investment decisions and so forth. It says that, if having gone through that franchising process a local transport authority quite legitimately decides that it will not make a scheme, then it is not allowed to re-embark on the process for another five years. I would be open to persuasion if the Minister were to say that the period should be three years or even two years, but there must be a period of respite for the incumbent private transport operators during which they and their employees know that they can get on with a future, with a prospect, with reasons for investment and know that they are not necessarily going to be taken into a franchise arrangement. Otherwise, they could live in a state of perpetual uncertainty, with all the effects that would have on investment, business planning and staff morale. Amendment 12 intends to prevent that happening. It involves no criticism of anybody and would be the result of a perfectly legitimate outcome of the process as it stands. But it would be an adverse effect if through change of control, which of course does not have to follow an election in a local authority—change of control happens quite often without elections taking place, because councillors defect or change to one side and coalitions change in local authorities—the bus company does not have that period of respite.

Finally, we come to Amendment 13, on which I will listen very carefully to what the Minister has to say. The Bill does not contemplate giving the Secretary of State any power to step in if everything goes horribly wrong. What I mean by horribly wrong is something equivalent to bankruptcy of a local authority. In that case, the Government have the power to send in commissioners to rescue the situation. A situation of perpetual drift and financial incoherence will not be allowed to persist because that would not be good for the local people served by that local authority. Commissioners are sent in, and everything is somehow brought back into order so that services and so forth can continue. What is contemplated in this amendment—and it is carefully worded—is that

“If, due to poor operational or financial management by the franchising authority or franchisees, there is a persistent failure”—

not a bad weekend—

“to deliver a service specified by the contract, the Secretary of State may”—

it is permissive—

“take over the management of the service”.

In exercising this power, he may become the counterparty to the contract and continue to do this until

“a new contract is let, or … another permanent solution is found”.

The Secretary of State should welcome having this power because it is possible for things to go horribly wrong. You can imagine a situation where bus services in a particular area simply collapse and stop running. What is to happen if that was to occur? This gives an answer to that question and gives the Secretary of State the power to step in.

I want to listen very carefully to what the Minister will say because it is just conceivable that he has this power or an appropriate power he can use. I have had the advantage of a brief discussion with him about this beforehand. The Transport Act, which this Bill amends, is a very large document and I do not have the resources of the Government Legal Service at my hand ploughing through it, looking for the necessary power. If the Minister replies that he has such a power and can point it out, my amendment would fall away. If not, it is something that I would want to press and something he, I hope, would welcome. With that, I beg to move.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, the variety of amendments in this group from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, seem to put even more obstacles in the way of any local transport authority which wishes to introduce franchising or any elected representatives who decide to franchise services. It feels to me that it is even more bureaucracy. These amendments feel like an ideological response rather than a genuine concern about bus service provision.

Local government should have the tools to implement what it assesses is suitable for its area and will be judged on whether it is providing the service that local communities need. Ultimately, the electorate will decide what they think of their services through the ballot box. I do not think we need the Secretary of State to intervene. I have confidence in local government to deliver what is needed for its communities. I am sure the Minister may have a similar viewpoint. I am interested to hear whether the Secretary of State does have a power if it is ultimately needed, but I await the response with interest.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, for what they had to say. I do not intend to press Amendment 9. I think it is a missed opportunity on the part of the Government. It certainly is not, and was never intended to be, an obstacle—how could it possibly be an obstacle to embarking on a franchising scheme that one has to issue a notice explaining what one is doing?

However, on Amendments 12 and 13, I am simply unconvinced by what the Minister said. You can be totally devoted to local decision-making and still expect the Secretary of State to have the power to appoint commissioners in the case of a failed local authority. That happens—and of course it should happen—rarely and in appropriate circumstances.

I think the Minister almost sounded frivolous. Let us say people were stranded in the Yorkshire Dales, waiting for a bus that never comes because of the persistent mismanagement of their local scheme. We would be able to quote the Minister and tell them that it is entirely a matter for local democracy—that when the local council elections come, in two or three years, they will be able to put this right, and the bus may then come and collect them. That is complete nonsense.

When the time comes, I may wish to test the opinion of the House on Amendments 12 and 13. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 9.

Amendment 9 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friends Lady Pinnock and Lord Goddard have raised, with Amendment 10, the elephant in the room: the adequacy of central government funding to support local bus services. While this legislation has the potential to transform bus services and empower local transport authorities, ultimately money is needed for this. This is not the view just of local and regional government—they would say that, wouldn’t they?—but the bus industry as well. Securing long-term clarity and certainty around funding for the sector—revenue and capital—will help enhance the benefits delivered to local communities. I look forward to the Minister’s thoughts on this amendment.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I have only two things to say. First, I look forward to the Minister confirming that the Greater Manchester franchising scheme was carried out without any government subvention at all, as the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, explained to the House was the case. It is something of a revelation to me, but of course I may be wrong and I look to the Minister to say whether he was right.

Secondly, I am surprised and saddened that the noble Lord, Lord Snape, whom I see in his place, has not intervened in this debate because, at Second Reading, he was voluble in explaining what we all know: that this Bill will make no difference at all if a very large amount of government money is not made available throughout the country to support it. Yet one listens to the Chancellor today with some sadness on behalf of the country that she has not been able to announce the growth rates she was hoping for, that inflation is higher, that growth rates are lower and that the tax yield is less. Where is this money to come from in these sad circumstances that we find ourselves in?

I do not know whether “elephant in the room” is the right expression, but the Bill is to some degree bogus, and the House is grateful, I am sure, to the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for pointing that out so acutely.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for this amendment and the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, for his intervention. It is helpful of him to have quoted those figures, which I concur with, if only because, earlier in the process of this Bill, some completely different figures were quoted—very high ones—which were incorrect. One reason why the figure in Manchester is so high is that the franchising process that the Mayor of Greater Manchester has had to go through has been tortuous. That is one of the reasons why this Bill is in front of this House—to make franchising simpler and easier to carry out. It is a great achievement for Transport for Greater Manchester and the mayor to have got to the place that they have. The noble Lord, Lord Goddard, remarked on the success of the bus service in Greater Manchester, with night services, more reliability and greater revenue than anybody expected.

I am sure that noble Lords will recall that I had the pleasure of standing here at the end of last year to announce a settlement of just under £1 billion to every local transport authority in the country. That was the first for some time; previous settlements had been partial and selective between different local transport authorities. Of course, the majority of that money could now be spent rather more economically on a faster franchising scheme, if that is what local transport authorities want to do. Some of them will not want to do that, because it is clear that bus services are a patchwork across England and plenty of towns and cities have adequate local bus services provided through enhanced partnerships. I have no doubt that a local transport authority will see no need to change them in those circumstances. I can name some of those places, but it is probably better if I do not.

In any event, the affordability of the proposed franchising schemes, and therefore funding, is already an integral aspect of franchising assessment, which is hard-wired into this legislation. Assessments’ financial case should include consideration of funding available from government, as set out in the statutory guidance. Indeed, the guidance for franchising schemes allows local transport authorities to choose whether it applies to all or part of their area, or to some small part of their area, for a necessarily much smaller expenditure. The franchising assessment must be published alongside the independent assurance report if an authority decides to proceed to a consultation, and that will ensure transparency about the proposed scheme’s financial viability and impact on communities.

For those reasons, although I absolutely respect the noble Baroness’s regard for the general measures in the Bill, I hope she will feel able to withdraw this amendment.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

The noble Lord referred to the £1 billion last year. Of course, £250 million of that went to bus companies, and £750 million went to local transport authorities, of which there are roughly 140. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that it was about a £5 million one-off sum to local transport authorities. I am not sure how far that takes you in terms of franchising and the subsidies that go with it, given that in London the subsidy is closer to £700 million than £7 million. If this Bill is to go forward, can the noble Lord give us any assurance that sums of that order or greater will be offered to local transport authorities in the future—or have we seen the best of it?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord quotes a subsidy figure for London, which is a world city of 10 million people. A choice is made by the Mayor of London in respect of the balance between fares and subsidy, amounting to the balance of subsidy that needs to be put into the network. The subsidy in Manchester will be nowhere near what the Mayor of Greater Manchester thought it would be, because of the relative growth in patronage after a long period of decline. I cannot promise any particular numbers, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, well knows, because that is a matter for the Chancellor, for future years and for a spending review. But I will say that that funding, and the fact that it was universally awarded to every local transport authority, is a clear indication of the Government’s commitment to devolution and local bus services in a way that was not apparent with the previous Government.

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[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, this group of amendments is very important and improves the legislation. I am pleased to read the many amendments from the Government, picking up the issues that many of us raised in Committee, for which I am grateful. But far more consultation and engagement with disabled persons and representative organisations is essential as franchising and enhanced partnerships are adopted by local authorities, and as routes are amended or changed and a new way of working settles down.

I am also pleased to see government Amendment 19, which ensures that local transport authorities in England make a bus network accessibility plan. That responds in part to the points raised by my noble friend Lady Brinton in Committee. However, as my noble friend has set out in Amendment 37, we need to take that further; it is essential that we get changes across the bus sector. We hope that the Government respond positively to that amendment.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the Official Opposition welcome and support the government amendments in this group, and we look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say in response to the very pertinent questions raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, in relation to her Amendment 37.

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Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

12: After Clause 11, insert the following new Clause—
“Franchising scheme: restrictionWhere a franchising authority, or two or more franchising authorities acting jointly, prepare an assessment of a proposed franchising scheme under section 123B of the Transport Act 2000 but fail, for any reason, to make and publish a scheme under section 123H of the Transport Act 2000, they must not initiate another franchising assessment for the same area, or a substantially similar area, for a period of five years from the date on which the assessment was prepared.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment prevents franchising authorities from repeatedly conducting franchising assessments for the same or substantially similar areas within a five-year period if they do not proceed to make and publish a franchising scheme.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the private sector—the private bus companies—will remain absolutely integral, even under a franchising arrangement and certainly under an enhanced bus partnership, to the provision of bus services in this country under the Government’s scheme. It is incumbent on us to treat them properly and with respect. They cannot be held constantly in a state of suspension, potentially not knowing what their future is, as a result of repeated franchise operations.

Amendment 12 is absolutely necessary in order to maintain the sense of investment and purpose that private bus companies need if they are going to go forward, and for that reason I wish to test the opinion of the House.

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Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

13: After Clause 11, insert the following new Clause—
“Poor performance of franchising(1) If, due to poor operational or financial management by the franchising authority or franchisees, there is a persistent failure to deliver a service specified by the contract, the Secretary of State may take over the management of the service.(2) In exercising this power, the Secretary of State may substitute themselves for the franchising authority in the relevant contract.(3) The Secretary of State shall continue to manage the service until such time as—(a) a new contract is let, or(b) another permanent solution is found.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to provide the Secretary of State with the power to intervene in cases where franchised bus services are persistently failing due to poor operational or financial management.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is common ground between the Minister and me that, in the event of a local authority failing financially, it is possible for the Secretary of State to send in commissioners to sort out the matter. It is also common ground between us that, in the similar event of a local transport authority failing financially and not being able to deliver the bus services that it has contracted, or a franchisee falling into bankruptcy, the Secretary of State would have no power under this Bill, and no power under the Transport Act that the Bill amends, to step in and do anything about it.

I think that every noble Lord in this House would agree, if they were entirely disinterested, that that is a power the Secretary of State should have. Amendment 13 would simply give the Secretary of State the power to step in, in those limited and prescribed circumstances, in the interests of passengers. It has been barely an hour since the Minister stood at the Dispatch Box and told us that the interests of passengers were absolutely at the heart of the Bill. Of course the Secretary of State should have this power, and for that reason I wish to test the opinion of the House.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, has put her finger on what might be described as the other elephant in the room. The whole purpose of this Bill is defeated if it does not result in uncommercial services being run on the basis of subsidy. We have discussed in a previous group the complete absence of any information from the Government about where those subsidies are coming from. In this amendment, the noble Baroness draws attention to the types of routes that should be included and what a socially necessary service is.

To the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, I say that no party cares for villages more than the Conservative Party. While I cannot sympathise with her attempt to resurrect bus routes as old as 15 years, I have great sympathy with what she has to say about villages. I hope that the Minister shares that and can reach out to her to achieve the sort of compromise that she is offering—and which can only improve the Bill.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, for Amendment 14. I know through discussions with her that she has a keen interest in protecting vital services, especially those outside large towns and cities. The Bill sets out that a socially necessary local service is a local bus service which

“enables passengers to access—essential goods and services … economic opportunities (including employment), or … social activities”

and which

“if cancelled, is likely to have a material adverse effect on the ability of passengers to access those goods, services, opportunities or activities”.

However, as there has been concern that not all essential services are covered by this definition, particularly healthcare and schools, I want to confirm through this statement to the House that “essential goods and services” includes healthcare, schools and other educational institutions. Therefore, a socially necessary local service may include a bus service which enables passengers to access healthcare and schools. The Government intend to produce detailed guidance to assist in the interpretation and application of this measure. For these reasons, I hope that the noble Baroness can withdraw her amendment.

I thank the noble Baroness also for Amendment 16 and want to reassure her that under Clause 12, when an operator wishes to cancel or amend a service, the operator and the local transport authority will need to give due consideration to the benefits that a bus service provides to the local community. LTAs will also need to consider alternatives to mitigate any adverse effects of changes to such services. Under the Transport Act 1985 and the Transport Act 1968, local authorities are already under a duty to secure public passenger transport services that they consider appropriate to secure to meet the requirements of the area and which would not otherwise be met. This is likely to include services that have been identified as socially necessary.

Clause 12 should result in additional transparency by identifying the number of socially necessary local services in an area where an enhanced partnership is in place. This in turn will provide government with additional information which can be used to inform the decision-making around funding for local bus services. Local transport authorities have the best understanding of the needs of their local communities. Any additional obligations introduced through legislation would place an undue burden on local authorities and undermine their independence. They should be able to consider all the possible options to deliver the best outcome for passengers.

On Amendment 15 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, there was a similar amendment in Committee. I reaffirm that this Government recognise that local transport authorities are best placed to understand and address the needs of the communities that they serve. This Bill is about giving them real powers to decide what is best for their local area. We can recognise that a service that has been cancelled within the last 15 years may no longer be a service that would meet the current needs of the community given that these will inevitably change over time, but I also recognise that some might still be relevant to the needs of the community. As local transport authorities address need for their communities, they can of course consider former routes if they believe that they would represent a contribution to socially necessary local services. In that, I recognise the rather unfortunate nature of some of the funding for rural bus services in recent years, which has provoked new services, cancelled old ones, had the new services withdrawn and had the old ones brought back. She is right in her assumption that local transport authorities should look at the recent past in considering the best pattern of socially necessary services.

I also recognise the need to serve villages just like the rest of the communities in a local transport authority area, and I am grateful to the noble Baroness for pointing out that this is rather more about making sure that the socially necessary services chosen by local transport authorities serve the complete community, including villages, and rather less about a review which, as she said, generally costs time and money—almost certainly, such reviews do. In terms of this Bill, however, it will take up to five years for local transport authorities either to transition to a franchise network or to form a bus company, with a period for the review itself. I agree that it is much better for local transport authorities to consider the needs of villages in their areas and the right options of routes to serve their local communities. I hope therefore that she will not press her amendments.

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Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

17: Clause 12, page 10, line 7, at end insert—
“(5) The Secretary of State must conduct an assessment of the impact of ending the £2 bus fare cap on passengers’ ability to access socially necessary local services identified in accordance with section 138A of the Transport Act 2000.”

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the Conservative Government maintained a cap on individual bus fares of £2. We pledged in our manifesto—and had we been re-elected we would have put into that effect that pledge—that we would continue the £2 bus cap. I suppose that I do not need to remind noble Lords that the Conservatives did not win the general election last year.

When the cap expired, the current Government replaced it with a £3 cap, with no examination whatever of the effect that might have. We are now in a position, as the months have rolled by, to carry out a review of its effect. We know from studies done independently by Frontier Economics and SYSTRA when the Conservatives were in power that the £2 fare cap delivered significant benefits. The report concluded that the scheme had had a positive impact on bus patronage and had helped to support the cost of living by reducing travel costs. It also noted an increase in the number and proportion of single bus journeys since the scheme began.

It would be a very strange thing indeed if the Government said that they did not wish to know the effects of their own policies. The Conservatives wanted to know, and commissioned reports to find out, what the effects of their fare policies were, but the current Government simply do not want to know. I cannot believe that that it is the response from the Front Bench. This amendment requires the Government to carry out that research and bring it to the House so that we can all understand the effect of this large increase in the bus fares cap. I beg to move.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, we on the Liberal Democrat Benches were saddened that the Government cancelled the £2 bus fare cap. It was an incredibly successful scheme that saw an increase in passengers on buses and made bus travel more affordable. I have an amendment to bring back a £2 bus fare cap scheme, which we will debate next week. I believe it is far stronger than this amendment before us today.

However, I am glad to see that His Majesty’s Opposition are highlighting this issue through an assessment of the scheme. As I said earlier, the key issue here is always the level of funding for bus services and, indeed, the costs to the passenger. If we want more people out of their cars and using buses, we need to ensure that fares are more attractive and services are provided where passengers need to go. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts on this amendment.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I will make just a few points about the former £2 national bus fare cap. The first is quite obvious. The previous Government left no forward funding for that scheme at the time of the election and, indeed, left a rather large hole in the public finances, which, in effect, prevented its continuation.

The second point is that it is very easy to assume that somehow the maximum cap of £3 meant that all fares went up by 50%. The vast majority of travellers on bus services travel for a short distance and many of them paid less than £2 in any event. Fares between £2 and £3 went up only by inflation, and the cap still applies to longer-distance journeys that would cost more than £3.

In any event, in February, the Government published an evaluation of the first 10 months of the £2 fare cap. Evidence from that suggests that the scheme had a relatively greater impact on leisure trips compared with those for education and employment and was, in fact, rather poor value for money. So I believe that a legislative requirement for further evaluation is unnecessary and, on that basis, I would ask for the amendment to be withdrawn.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I hesitate to be drawn by the noble Lord, Lord Snape, who intends only to provoke me. But I am to some extent provoked. I am provoked to the extent of pointing out that there was a solemn pledge by the Conservative Party in its manifesto to continue the £2 bus cap and that the Conservative Party keeps its pledges. He should not find that astounding.

As far as the Minister is concerned, we suddenly discover that leisure trips on buses are of no account and no real value. “It is much better if people use their cars for leisure trips”. I mean, really, this an astonishing convolution of his arguments: “Now we don’t value leisure trips”. Of course we want people to use buses for leisure trips—and not merely people who are economically active. This is something the Government should understand properly. They should look into the effects of their own policy. I wish to test the opinion of the House.

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Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

17A: Clause 12, page 10, line 7, at end insert—
“(5) The Secretary of State must undertake an assessment of the impact of the level of employers’ National Insurance contributions on the provision of socially necessary bus services, including transport services for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and lay it before both Houses of Parliament within 3 months of the day on which this Act is passed.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would require for a review of how the increase in National Insurance contributions from 6 April 2025 would affect socially necessary bus services, including transport services for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, in the last week or two, your Lordships’ House has occupied itself extensively with the effects of the increase in national insurance contributions on various parties, often vulnerable and small operations. One of those is the private sector providers of special educational needs transport. They are vulnerable to the increase in national insurance contributions, for reasons that have been spelled out at considerable length in earlier debates on another Bill.

In the end, it seems likely that your Lordships’ House will, with its customary sense of responsibility, give way on the NICs Bill and allow the Government to have their way, and to do so very shortly. After all, in the end, the King’s Government must go on and the King must have supply; it is a financial matter. Fortuitously now, we have in front of us a Bill on bus services, where we have an opportunity to return to the matter—I shall speak only briefly, because it has been well aired—and come forward with a measure which is not financial in character and against which the other place will not claim financial privilege.

Amendment 17A simply calls for an assessment by the Government of the consequences for SEND transport of the increase to and changes in national insurance contributions. Noble Lords will not need reminding that it is not merely the rate that has an effect but the threshold at which the national insurance contributions are payable. In a way, this is the least the Government can offer, after the way in which your Lordships’ House has, as I say, indulged them with its customary sense of responsibility.

We should look at this carefully. This form of transport is absolutely crucial to schools and it is part of the bus service, in the broadest sense. I hope very much that the Government will be able to support this amendment. I beg to move.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches have consistently advocated for sufficient funding to meet the transport needs of those requiring accessible services, particularly those relying on special educational needs and disabilities—known as SEND—bus services. Given our support on this issue, in this Bill and other legislation, we feel it is essential to assess the impact of NICs increases on these vital services.

A review would ensure transparency, protect accessibility for SEND passengers and mitigate financial pressures on operators that could jeopardise these services. Without a proper review, there is a real risk that rising costs could force operators to cut routes or reduce service levels, leaving many SEND passengers without reliable transport. This would undermine efforts to create an inclusive and accessible bus network. A thorough bus assessment would help identify any necessary mitigations, to ensure that SEND services remain sustainable, well-funded and fit for purpose.

Protecting these services is a matter not just of policy but of fairness, ensuring that no one is left behind due to financial pressures beyond their control. We therefore support this amendment and look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 17A concerns the impact that the increase in employer national insurance contributions will have on socially necessary bus services, including those for children with special educational needs and disabilities. The Government do not expect the changes to national insurance to have a significant effect on home-to-school travel for children with special educational needs and disabilities, so it would not be proportionate to conduct the assessment that this amendment suggests.

Local authorities are responsible for arranging home-to-school travel and delivering this through a range of providers. Department for Education officials engage regularly with local authorities to understand the challenges that they face and will continue to monitor this situation. It is expected that private sector organisations that contract with local authorities will take the impact of national insurance changes into account, along with other changes to their cost base, in the usual way through contract negotiations.

The Government have already announced £2 billion of new grant funding for local government in 2025-26, which includes £515 million to support councils with the increase in employer national insurance contributions. This is not ring-fenced funding, and could therefore be used to fund contracted services should a local authority wish to. Moreover, I understand that a large proportion of special educational needs and disabilities transport operators are self-employed and therefore exempt from this charge. The Government are protecting the smallest businesses and charities by increasing the employment allowance to £10,500. Next year, 865,000 employers will pay no national insurance contributions at all, more than half of employers will see no change or will gain overall from this package, and employers will be able to employ up to four full-time workers on the national living wage and pay no employer national insurance contributions.

On socially necessary services more broadly, excluding special educational needs and disabilities transport, the Government have already confirmed, as I said, an additional £925 million for the 2025-26 financial year to support and improve bus services in England outside London. The Government recognise that local transport authorities are best placed to understand the needs of their communities and can use the £925 million to introduce new bus routes, make services more frequent and protect crucial bus routes, ensuring passenger access to essential goods and services. I contend that this amendment is not required.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a sorry reply from the Minister. The modest amounts of money he splashes around seem to have an awful lot of work to do, since they are the response to nearly every group of amendments we have discussed. It is very sad that he does not want to accept this amendment, and, in that light, I feel I am obliged to test the opinion of the House.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

20: Clause 18, page 13, line 35, at end insert—
“(4A) In relation to the award of a local service contract by one or more franchising authorities pursuant to a franchising scheme, any contract to be awarded pursuant to that franchising scheme shall not be an exempted contract under the Procurement Act 2023 unless awarded to a local government bus company that is an Exempted Local Government Bus Company and Schedule 2 to the Procurement Act 2023 shall be construed accordingly.(4B) An Exempted Local Government Bus Company is a local government bus company as defined by subsection (5) and which was in business providing local services on 17 December 2024.(4C) In section 3 of the Procurement Act 2023 (public contracts), after subsection (6) insert—“(7) Section 18 of the Bus Services (No. 2) Act 2025 restricts the circumstances in which local service contracts awarded to a local government bus company are to be regarded as exempted contracts.””Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that any contract awarded under a franchising scheme by one or more franchising authorities cannot be exempt from the Procurement Act 2023 unless it is awarded to a local government bus company that meets specific criteria - specifically one that was actively providing local services as of December 17 2024, and aligns with the provisions outlined in section 18(5) of the Act.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I hope noble Lords will agree that in my speeches so far this evening I have been as brief as possible. This amendment is of some technicality and legally quite complex. Not being a lawyer, I hope that I can get it right and explain it correctly in as brief a compass as possible, but if I go on a little bit longer than I have otherwise, I hope noble Lords will indulge me.

I will start at some distance from the Bill, with European Union procurement law, to which we were subject for so many years. Anybody involved in local government or any departmental procurement will remember that it obliged us to put out to tender any contracts that were above a certain threshold. We had to advertise them and go through what was known as the OJEU process.

At that time in European law, a question arose: what was the situation of a public authority which had set up its own company? Could it award work to a company which was its own subsidiary, without going out to tender? This case, which was called Teckal, went to the European Court of Justice, which determined that in certain circumstances, especially those in which the subsidiary was doing substantially most of its work for the public authority, contracts could be awarded to it without the need for any tendering. So, you have a public authority which has a subsidiary, the subsidiary does most of its work for that public authority, and contracts can be awarded without going out to tender—the Teckal exemption.

Of course, we left the European Union and in the course of time we replaced that procurement legislation with our own Procurement Act, seen so ably through the House, if I may so, by my noble friend Lady Neville- Rolfe. That procurement legislation carried forward the provisions of the Teckal exemption—I do not know whether it is still called that but I am going to call it that because everybody in the procurement universe does—so that the situation I described still pertains in UK law.

The Bill offers to local transport authorities three ways of carrying forward the provision of bus services: through an enhanced bus partnership, through the franchising route, or through establishing their own bus company subsidiary. It is manifest to me, even as a non-lawyer, that a bus company that was established and owned by a local transport authority, which inevitably would provide practically all its services to that local transport authority, would qualify for the Teckal exemption —that is, work would be given to it without going out to tender. I am going to park that for a moment.

Let us now travel to a different part of the Bill, relating to the franchising route. Permission is given to local transport authorities to make initially what is called a “direct award”, which is to give to the existing incumbent bus company the contract to carry out the franchised service without going out to tender. This provision would apply for only a limited period. One understands the Government’s thinking on this: if you are going to adopt a franchise model and you have only one bus company operating, then perhaps you should be able to give it to that company for the sake of continuity and smooth operation and then develop the market later, so that when you next arrange your franchising there is a market into which you can tender. The direct award route is not in itself objectionable— I am not saying that anything in this is objectionable.

I come to the interaction of the two, because the anxiety is that the legislation is so drafted—not deliberately, I imagine, but I will come to that—that it may be possible for a local authority on the one hand to use the route of setting up its own subsidiary bus company: a so-called LABCo, which seems to be the terminology that is going round; I depreciate it as much as I think the Minister does, from the shaking of his head. On the other hand, a local authority could then use the direct award mechanism to give the whole contract to its own subsidiary immediately and without any tendering.

I think the Minister can respond to what I have said by saying one of three things. Fortunately for him, I have given him my own inadequate explanation of this case in advance, so he has had some time to think about it. He can say that I have got the law wrong—he has the benefit of the Government Legal Department behind him, and I have my poor resources, so that may be the answer. He will be able to explain why I have got the law wrong and put the House right as to what the legal position is. That is one thing. He could say that I have alighted upon a loophole and a weakness in the legislation which should be addressed, that he is going to take steps to address it, that my amendment is therefore unnecessary and that something will be done between now and Third Reading. Or he could say words to the effect that I have got the law right, the loophole exists, and he is going to do nothing at all about it. In the last case, I give notice that I suspect I would want to the test the opinion of the House, but in the first two cases, if I was corrected on the law or if the Minister said that he agreed with me on the law and was going to do something about it, then I would of course expect to withdraw my amendment.

I am very interested to hear what noble Lords have to say about this exciting argument that could, for all I know, provoke widespread debate in the House, but I am particularly interested to know what the Minister has to say when he comes to reply. I beg to move.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

This is a rather technical amendment, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, stated, and one about which I have received several pieces of correspondence in the last 24 hours. Although I understand the intent of the amendment, I am not sure that it is actually necessary. I find it hard to imagine that local authorities, which often struggle with capacity and the financial means to deliver, will want to suddenly introduce their own bus company just ahead of awarding contracts directly to this new company. I hope the Minister can clarify the situation and allay any fears.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

Amendment 20, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, said, seeks to prevent new local authority bus companies—I will not say LABCos; I cannot make that work—from being able to directly award franchising contracts using what he described correctly as the Teckal-style exemption in the Procurement Act 2023.

Clause 18 will help to support public ownership where desired by repealing the ban on new local authority bus companies, but the Bill is not prescriptive about the structure of any of those new companies. Local authorities can consider a range of options for structuring a new bus company. One of these options could be to establish a new company as a Teckal company, which would, as he says, allow a local authority to directly award service contracts to that company without the requirement for a competitive procurement exercise at any time.

The noble Lord referred to Teckal as a loophole, but it is part of a much wider landscape of public procurement law, which, as he says, was enacted in the Procurement Act 2023 by the previous Government. Use of the Teckal exemption is complex and subject to challenge, given that it allows contract awards outside the usual controls imposed by the public procurement regime, and specific and rigorous tests are required to use the exemption. Local authorities must be careful to ensure that these companies are within the Teckal parameters if they pursue this option, which would likely require significant funding and investment in organisational capacity and capability, as the noble Baroness referred to. All this means that any local authority looking at Teckal would need to consider very carefully whether this is appropriate for its local context.

Existing precedent for Teckal local authority bus companies in the UK, while limited, is that Teckal has been used only in scenarios where private operators are not interested or fail—for example, as an operator of last resort. For existing Teckal companies, the exemption is utilised only in the event of private operators being unable to do so, rather than as the default option for providing local bus services. Teckal is open to all public bodies that own any type of commercial company; it does not apply only to local authorities, only to local authority bus companies, or only to transport companies. Removing Teckal as an option only for new local authority bus companies would be an unusual—and, I believe, unnecessary—departure from the status quo around existing procurement legislation. As it stands, there does not appear to be a compelling reason to isolate new local authority bus companies as the only type of public company that cannot use Teckal, and no evidence has been provided to support what would be an extraordinary diversion from established procurement rules.

My department plans to publish guidance on local authority bus companies after the Bill comes into force, which will address the use of the Teckal exemption. We will of course work very closely with stakeholders when developing and drafting the guidance to help ensure that the exemption, if used, will not be about local authority bus companies having the upper hand over the private sector but about genuinely improving bus services for local passengers in that area. I therefore hope that the noble Lord can withdraw his amendment.

It might be convenient if I briefly move on to Amendments 21, 22 and 23, tabled in my name, which are also about helping to provide a level playing field between new and existing local authority bus companies. Clause 18 gives all local authorities the freedom to set up a new bus company if they choose to. Under this clause, new companies are not subject to restrictions regarding how they might secure funding or financing. This is at odds with the five existing local authority bus companies that are. Restrictions, as set out in the Transport Act 1985, mean that the existing local authority bus companies are unable to access private finance, which creates inconsistencies. My department has engaged extensively with stakeholders while developing the measures for this Bill and feedback has been strongly in favour of greater parity between how new and existing local authority bus companies can finance their operations.

The amendment will remove restrictions on existing local authority bus companies accessing private borrowing, if they are doing so for the purposes of, or in connection with, providing local services. As I have mentioned, this will help to provide a level playing field for both new and existing local authority bus companies. It will provide greater choice for local authorities in how they potentially fund a local authority bus company, which will give them more freedom to achieve ambitious and far-reaching improvements to local bus services. Amendments 21 and 22 are consequential to Amendment 23.

I finish by saying that I do not believe that there is likely to be a large-scale establishment of new local authority bus companies, but the powers contained in this Bill are necessary because, frankly, the bus market is not what it was. There is not much competition in some areas, and in others there is none. In those cases, a new local authority bus company might well be the way in which a local transport authority seeks to provide bus services in the future. It would be, as a postscript, a fitting riposte to some of the excesses of previous eras of competition in bus companies. I will not repeat it now, but if noble Lords were to look at the sorry story of the Darlington bus wars, where a perfectly satisfactory municipal bus company was reduced to being put into liquidation by the predatory activities of private companies, they would see why there might be some interest in local authorities to set up new local bus companies in the future. There might even be a little interest in using Teckal to do so.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise for not addressing in my opening remarks the government amendments in this group, which I am happy to say I am content with. I mean, if one is as short of money as the Minister and his department probably are then giving local transport authorities the power to borrow money is probably the best that you can hope to get away with. We have no objection to those amendments.

I am disappointed—well, not entirely disappointed; I am rather thrilled—that the Minister has more or less agreed that I got the complex legal position right, but I am disappointed that he feels that the loophole should stay open. It should not. One of the purposes that the Government have set out is to encourage competition, where it can be stimulated, between bus service providers. To allow those two provisions to operate together in a way that would exclude competition would be an abuse. The abuse should be closed down. It is simple to do so: they could just say it was not going to be allowed. It would not upend procurement law. It would not overturn the sacred rules of procurement. It would simply say, in this specific case, because of the way these two statutes will interact, you cannot actually do the thing that would be an abuse. So I am sorry to say, because I know it is getting on—actually, we have made good progress and there is time—that I am afraid I am going to have to ask the House’s opinion on this matter, because I do not think the Government should be allowed to take this lackadaisical approach.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased to see these amendments from the Government around the issue of data transparency and the use and processing of personal data relating to the bus sector. I am assured by the Minister’s introductory remarks on this group of amendments.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, we have no objection to these amendments.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I commend these amendments to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, this Bill has been about bus services outside the capital, yet at this stage there is suddenly a lengthy amendment about London and giving Transport for London the powers it needs more easily and effectively to support by-laws on London buses. The Minister has provided clarity on this and the other government amendments in this group; they have provided the assurance needed, and we are content with them.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, we have no objections.

Amendment 30 agreed.

Disruption at Heathrow

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for advance sight of the Statement made yesterday.

The remarkable thing about this event is what it was not. It was not a hostile terrorist attack, but in the first few moments no one could have known that. Indeed, the natural suspicion would have been that it was. That circumstance can only enhance our admiration for, and our thanks to, the firefighters in particular, and other responders who rushed to the scene not knowing what would await them. We are all very grateful to them and all the others who pulled Heathrow back from this incident for what they did.

It is worth also saying a word of thanks to the staff of Heathrow Airport, and I would like to do so. It may seem a fairly simple thing to switch an airport off and then, a while later, just to switch it back on again. There are rare occasions when this happens. I am thinking of the example of Bangkok airport in 2008, when an occupation by protesters for a week caused the airport to be shut down deliberately. On that occasion, once it was safe to do so, it took a full five days to restart the airport safely. The fact that the staff at Heathrow were able to respond so well and so effectively to the changes—I cannot describe or imagine them—in electrical work required to operate the airport, and to do so quickly and safely, shows their skill and abilities, and is something that we should be grateful for and acknowledge.

Once it was clear that this was not a terrorist incident, everyone could relax. The chief executive of Heathrow was so relaxed that he went back to bed. But of course, the people who could not relax were the passengers affected by this event. Across the world, it is estimated that nearly 300,000 people were affected by this incident, spread out over 1,350 flights. Does the Minister think that they have received an adequate apology? Many of them will be receiving financial compensation, depending on their carrier and the jurisdiction that they live under, but is financial compensation simply enough? Is it too easy for us to think, “Oh, they’ve got their compensation and their refund—we don’t actually need to apologise”? I have not seen a great deal of apologising going on to people who were very seriously affected and disrupted in their lives and in their plans.

Turning to the specifics of the incident, it raises significant questions about Heathrow’s resilience and the safeguarding of critical infrastructure. The fact that the airport was reliant on this electrical substation which proved so vulnerable is concerning and the outage serves as a stark reminder that energy security is about not only affordability but ensuring the physical safety and reliability of our infrastructure. I would like to hear what the Minister has to say about that reliability and security.

I will say immediately that I recognise that it is not always the right answer to build in huge amounts of redundancy in the light of an event that may happen only very occasionally. These are difficult judgments to make. All that redundancy costs a lot of money. I know that the Government and Heathrow have to make difficult judgments about it. I would like, however, at least to hear in what direction the Government are going in making those judgments: whether they think they have got the balance right and what should be done. Given the essential role of airports to our economy, what discussions has the Minister had with the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero regarding the security of energy supplies to our major airports? Can the Minister tell us what the timeline is for the Kelly review being undertaken on behalf of Heathrow Airport? Does he expect its findings to be fully publicly accessible?

Finally, will the Government assess the incident in the broader context of Heathrow’s expansion? I am not referring exclusively to plans for a third runway. Heathrow has significant expansion plans that fall short of a third runway that it is progressing with securing approval for at the moment. Does the Minister believe that the current infrastructure challenges at Heathrow raise wider concerns about the viability and resilience of that expansion? What steps will be taken to ensure that any future expansion does not exacerbate the vulnerabilities exposed by this recent disruption? What steps will be taken to ensure that any future expansion does not increase the airport’s vulnerability to this sort of event?

Commercial Vehicles: Safety

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The safety requirements that the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, asked me about are those applicable to new vehicles. The standards of safety that apply to all vehicles on the UK’s roads are the latest standards that applied at the time at which they were manufactured, of course, improved by the regular testing system. There are reasons why historic vehicles cannot always comply with modern standards. There is a silver lining in that, which is that most very ancient vehicles cannot go very fast. My experience of the vehicle testing regime is that it is rigorous but respectful of the age of vehicles and their original manufacturing condition.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Minister on his birthday. It is a great pity that it is not being celebrated by a parade around Parliament Square featuring the noble Lord driving his bus accompanied by my noble friend Lord Attlee driving his Army truck. Perhaps that it is something to plan for next year. Broadening this out a little bit, UK motor manufacturing is in a state of crisis. Is it not time for the Government to take a lead from the Conservative Party and start to reassess their net-zero and, in particular, imposed electric vehicle targets while we still have a domestic motor manufacturing base to save?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

To the serious point that the noble Lord raises, the Government are continuing to modernise the requirements for vehicles on British roads and are continuing to insist on the trajectory to zero-emission vehicles, for obvious reasons. In fact, contrary to the implication of what he says, that was started by the previous Government. On a more jocular note, neither the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, nor I need to add to the traffic around Parliament Square, particularly in the past few days.

Great British Railways: Industrial Action

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Moylan]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what role Great British Railways will have in resolving industrial action on the railways.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)]

My Lords, when Great British Railways takes over, it will be responsible for the industrial relations of the railway. Its establishment depends, of course, on the passage of the forthcoming railways Bill through Parliament. In the meantime, as each train operation comes into public ownership, the transfer of undertakings regulations will apply, and thus the existing negotiating arrangements will apply for these operators and, of course, for Network Rail. There is currently no new industrial action on the railway network except for a projected eight-week strike on Hull Trains, which is an open-access operator and therefore not the responsibility of the Government.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, we know from what we saw only a few months ago that, under the current departmental management, the Department for Transport is very good at giving out public money to ASLEF and the RMT without securing any improvements in working practices in exchange. Why will this be different when GBR is managing the railways? What additional tools will it have that will secure the improvement in working practices on the railways that all of us want to see?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The answer to the noble Lord’s point is that it will have competent long-term management. The longest dispute in recent history on the national railway network was the one which was solved with an additional 2% pay offer last summer. That dispute lost an estimated £850 million-worth of revenue over the two years that it took place. Significantly, there were no productivity measures on the table at the time when the dispute was settled, simply because there had been a long-standing dispute between the employers—the owning groups of the train operating companies—and the department about the share of the revenue savings that they would get if productivity was applied. That meant that, in several train companies, there were no proposals whatever extant that could be implemented. Any sensible employer has in their mind the things that they need to do to make their operation more efficient and a negotiating strategy with their employees to achieve it. That was not the case last summer, but it will be the case in future.

Airport Expansion

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

While I respect the noble Baroness’s view, the fact remains that a decent analysis suggests a third runway will create economic growth of measurable proportions to the British economy. This Government are extraordinarily keen on economic growth, for the obvious reason that the legacy of the previous Government left the economy in a really bad place. We need to use every means of economic growth that we have got to grow the economy and make the country more prosperous.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, when Heathrow was previously promoting this runway some eight or nine years ago, the estimated cost was £18 billion. Because of the regulated asset-based model on which it is funded, this cost will fall on the airlines and then further, consequently, on the passengers of airlines. Should not the Government be consulting passengers about whether they want this runway, as much as anything else? What plans do the Government have to consult them, and indeed the airlines?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

As soon as the noble Lord got up, I was reminded that he was one of the principal promoters of the Thames estuary airport. That was a good, innovative and brave proposal, but would have cost the country far more than the figures he is quoting for the expansion of Heathrow. We have to wait for the proposals from Heathrow, or any other promoter, for the third runway and see what they look like. We can then see what the application for a DCO actually consists of, how much it is said to cost and what else needs to be done in order to achieve it. That will clearly be work in progress, considering that a proposal is expected only early in the summer.

Stockton and Darlington Railway: 200th Anniversary

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I am certainly willing to give credit to another Celtic nation for the invention of the steam engine. The matter of coal is, of course, a much wider question than coal for heritage railways. I would ask the noble Lord to look at an aerial photograph of the last Welsh opencast coal mine and the hideous blot on the landscape that it represents, and also at the huge damage that coal and the coal-fired equipment has done to the environment and the atmosphere. It is a factor in the continued provision of heritage railways and, as he says, steamboats, that there should be some coal. There is some coal, and I can write to him, if he wants, about the means by which coal substitutes can be procured rather than reopening coal mines.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, returning to the Question, Parliament, particularly your Lordships’ House, played a crucial role in the creation of the railways. Over a period of 200 years, noble Lords have toiled at the coalface of the hybrid Bills and other legislation without which the railways would not exist at all today. Can the Minister say that Parliament will feature prominently in the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the railways? Might there even be an opportunity for noble Lords to fulfil some childhood dreams and drive a steam train?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I can certainly ensure that the noble Lord is able to drive a steam train, but it will not be on a railway line near Parliament. Parliament will have a unique opportunity this year to contribute to the future of Britain’s railways by considering and then passing the forthcoming railways Bill, which will put the railway back into a state where it can generate revenue, run better and reduce its costs. I think that will be an excellent contribution of Parliament to the future of the railway.

Violence Against Women and Girls on Trains

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. It was quite a long time ago, but I was responsible for the original drink ban on the London Underground, which was enacted by the second Mayor of London. It was, by and large, successful—and it still is, although enforcement is always an issue. It is not practicable to have somebody in attendance on a railway platform for every station in Great Britain. Many of them have very few travellers, and those which are busy generally do have someone. I agree with the sentiment that it is desirable to have somebody on the platform. In fact, to be frank, it is better to have somebody around the station than it is to have them in a booking office, but those are discussions that the previous Government did not manage very well. This Government will think about how to best staff stations in order to make sure that all passengers feel comfortable and safe when travelling by train.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I appreciate that the British Transport Police is responsible to an independent authority, but when one looks at its annual report, one sees many pages devoted to net zero and diversity and inclusion but nothing that I can find specifically about how it is tackling operationally violence against women and girls. Does the Minister think that the British Transport Police has got the balance right, or is there scope for improvement?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I assure the noble Lord that tackling violence against women and girls is a top priority for the British Transport Police. At the meeting I previously referred to with the authority and the BTP, the chief constable was vigorous in making sure that everybody knew that a significant proportion of the total resources of the British Transport Police is devoted to tackling violence against women and girls. I should be only too happy to ask the chief constable to brief the noble Lord personally about how much effort is being put into this subject. I hope he will take me up on that offer.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 13th February 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

As far as I have heard on this third day in Committee and at Second Reading, there has been a majority consensus for the Government’s proposals. What we are trying to do is to draw out those issues that we hope the Government will be able to address. One, as we have heard this afternoon, is rural bus services—and, indeed, access for island services. Equally, we understand that that will probably mean more funding. We had a debate on that on an earlier day in Committee. This is not about criticism or blame; it is about pulling out the issues.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I wonder if I could interrupt the noble Baroness to say that I hope that she realises that this Bill does not give the Government powers to run bus services. The whole point of this Bill is to give powers to local government to run bus services. When she says, “We want the Government to address these issues”, it is unclear to me to what she is referring. If she says that she wants the Government to provide funding to address these issues, that is fine, but if the funding is to be specific and hypothecated to particular purposes—say, to the crossing of bodies of water or certain rural services—then what is the point of giving the powers to local government? They should be making those decisions, wherever the funding comes from. I find the Liberal Democrat position on these provisions very difficult to follow.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

I am not sure who is giving way to whom at the present time. I will come to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, in a moment or two, because I would be fascinated to hear his summing up of this matter—I wait with bated breath. Having gorged on those subsidies when he worked for TfL, while his party denuded the rest of the country of bus services, his response will be absolutely fascinating.

I ask the noble Baroness—I hope without causing too much offence—that if these proposals are to be properly implemented, who will provide the finance? It has to be either local or central government. The reality of these matters is that, in the short term, there will not be a massive improvement in rural bus services once this Bill becomes law. I only wish that the opposite were true. Perhaps my noble friend the Minister can reassure me that it will be true. However, until we know exactly how funds will be allocated and how great those funds are, I must say to the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, that, as ably as she moved this amendment, it is, as far as I can see, rather typical of the Liberal Democrats—all motherhood and apple pie.

[Lord Burns (CB)]

My Lords, I mentioned at Second Reading that I had been chairman of the North Wales Transport Commission in 2023-24. I spent a lot of time in north Wales looking at the performance of the bus services there. I am wholly persuaded of the merits of a franchising system in rural areas as well as in more urban areas, because we all know the problems that the existing system has created. However, I should point out—this follows the previous intervention—that doing this work and deciding which routes need to be run and where people wish to go is a time-consuming business. It will take a significant period to monitor where the car journeys are presently being taken and what kind of network is best going to meet the needs of people. I find the notion that there should be review of this within six months or even two years very ambitious, because in the work that I was engaged in it was time-consuming to get anywhere near a feel of how to create an integrated network rather than just a set of buses that were serving individual parts of the of the area.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords I am grateful to everyone who has spoken in this debate. We on our side are supportive of the importance of taking into account the needs of people dwelling in rural areas. Indeed, we have our own amendment to a very similar effect in a later group, which could have been disposed of here. Our proposal to the Liberal Democrats was that it be wrapped up with their proposals, but that was rejected, so now it is going to be debated as a separate group, somewhat repetitiously, towards the end of the list. So we generally support this.

A lot of what I wanted to say has been anticipated. I know that he does not like the fact that he and I agree on quite a lot of things, but the noble Lord, Lord Snape, has brought a dose of sensible realism to the debate, for the first time, perhaps, in our Committee. He was supported in that endeavour by the noble Lord, Lord Burns, with his practical knowledge of having examined the bus routes, the lack of bus routes and the potential bus routes in north Wales.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said that this Bill will transform bus services. As shorthand for an aspiration, that is fair enough, but the Bill in itself is not going to transform bus services at all, although that might be the aim. What it is going to do is transform the governance of bus services in two ways, both of them subject to the provision of very large amounts of money, which can come only from central Government and which is not apparent at the moment, although we are all aware that a spending review is in hand. Who knows what will happen? You stick in your thumb and pull out a plum. Who knows what is going to arrive for bus services or rural bus services when the Chancellor has completed her work? At the moment, we cannot say. We can say only that a large amount of money will be needed.

The two respects in which the governance will be changed to which I wish to draw attention are, first, that operational decisions about the running of buses are going to be transferred fundamentally from managers of bus service companies, who have a great deal of experience, to committees of councillors with very much less experience. They will take advice, no doubt, and the Government have said that they are going to offer them the advice of the Bus Centre of Excellence to do the sorts of things that the noble Lord, Lord Burns, referred to. They include, particularly, route planning, but these councillors will also be responsible for fare setting, and fares and ticketing is a great skill and art. We might all think that it is terribly easy to decide on a bus fare, but the whole business of fares and ticketing is a professional and skilled business. There is a great deal that they are going to have to do which they will now be responsible for, which previously they were not, with very little skills support because the Bus Centre of Excellence is a relatively small operation.

The other way in which the governance is going to be transformed—and this is what relates to my three amendments in this group, which I will dispose of briefly in a moment—is that for the first time, effectively, the Secretary of State is going to be issuing guidance that will shape the provision of bus services in a way that simply is not the case when bus services are provided privately. As far as I am aware, that is not the case in Manchester, let us say, where there is no great guidance coming from the Government. Manchester has adopted franchising powers already. But there will be guidance and the local transport authorities, in providing bus services, are going to be subject to it.

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[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not think I will offend too many people if I say that no one could object to this amendment. Fares play an important role, but I do not think we should overemphasise the role they play. Travel West Midlands, a company with which I was involved for some years, did regular passenger surveys—largely a tick-box exercise, for obvious reasons, handed out by the driver or staff at bus stops. Funnily enough, fares never topped the list of complaints; reliability, congestion and safety all came before fares for passengers in the West Midlands. That is not to play down the impact of fares on passenger carrying, but it should be kept in perspective.

As for the contribution from the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, I kept count at Second Reading, and that is 11 different reviews, reports and committees that the Conservative Party has so far advanced in the debates on this legislation. I hope that management time—or ministerial time, for that matter—can perhaps concentrate more on running effective services and less on producing reports to the demand of the Conservative Party, largely about matters that its period in office considerably worsened for the bus industry.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am again very grateful to all noble Lords who spoke. I am surprised that I have to help the noble Lord, Lord Snape, understand that very frequently in Committee, as a way in which to provoke some sort of debate or to probe the Government’s intentions, it might be appropriate to ask for a report without necessarily wanting to amend the Bill in that direction when we come to Report—ill named, perhaps. I am sure he realises that his jibe against the Conservative Party has fallen flat.

I was rather pleased to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, say that she would welcome opening things up to the private sector to develop interesting, innovative and technological apps and ways of paying. I think that is the first thing we have heard said in favour of the private sector in Committee so far.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and, in a sense, the noble Lord, Lord Snape—what he was saying was to some extent a response to what the noble Baroness had been saying—bring us to the heart of a debate that most politicians try to run away from: how bus services and other public transport are to be paid for. What is the role of fares in paying for them?

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 51 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, would require local transport authorities to review the impact of bus fares on patronage. Where a local transport authority has delivered fare interventions to encourage patronage, such as Cornwall’s bus fares pilot and the West Yorkshire Combined Authority Mayor’s fare intervention, they have already commissioned independent evaluation reports to measure their success. Bus service improvement plans already in place also include measures addressing bus fares to encourage greater use of buses. We must recognise that changes to fares are usually delivered at the same time as other transport interventions that support and improve bus services. It would therefore be challenging to attribute any change in patronage solely to a change in the fare charged to passengers.

Your Lordships will have noted that the Government are in the process of negotiating the outcomes for which local transport authorities will be held accountable in respect of buses, as part of their recent respective comprehensive funding settlements. In addition to outcome monitoring at a local level, we will continue to monitor fare impacts at a national level to inform future fare cap decisions.

In passing, I note the noble Baroness’s observations about whether Shropshire adopted the £2 fare cap. I am informed that all except six bus services in Shropshire were covered, although I would not say that the bus network in Shropshire was either adequate or satisfactory. One of the effects of the Bill, when it becomes an Act, will be to enable local transport authorities to do better by the various means embraced within it. I therefore submit that the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, is unnecessary because of the actions already taking place.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, for Amendment 63, which seeks to examine the impact of ending the £2 national bus fare cap. The department has prepared a full monitoring and evaluation report of the £2 national bus fare cap, which has just been published. The report is available to read and I will make sure that noble Lords present have the link to it. It suggests that urban populations are more likely to have used the scheme, where of course journeys are shorter and fares are more likely to be £2 or less. In fact, the average fare payable on buses prior to the scheme’s introduction was between £2 and £3. The Government’s adoption of a £3 cap, and the added safeguard of increases above £2 being limited to the rate of inflation, do a great deal, at the cost of £150 million, to continue to ensure that millions can access better opportunities and get greater bus use.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

A study of the effect of the £2 bus cap would be very valuable—let us remember that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, said that in her rural part of Dorset it was transformative; I think that was the word she used about it having a significant effect in that part of the world—and we look forward to reading it. But my noble friend Lord Effingham was also asking for a study of what the effect of increasing it would be when that is introduced, which would be equally valuable and show the other part of the equation, if noble Lords see what I mean. I press the Minister because I do not want him to miss the point inadvertently. Is a similar study of the effect of increasing the cap to £3 after an appropriate period—six months or a year—something to which he can commit himself today to illuminate that picture for us?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for that. I will certainly think about whether, and at what stage, the department would look at that further. I am certainly not going to commit to it today, because we are looking at wide-ranging legislation about bus services in general, but I wanted to inform the Committee that the work on the £2 bus fare cap is now published.

Amendments 74 and 80 from the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, also concern the £2 bus fare cap, which I have just addressed. They are clearly intended to seek its reintroduction. Bearing in mind what the average bus fare is, that the Government are proposing to continue with a £3 cap and that fares between £2 and £3 will go up only by the rate of inflation, I hope she will agree that those amendments are unnecessary. However, the noble Baroness referred to the wider retailing of bus tickets, which is obviously a good idea; from time to time, I find myself agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. Access to bus services should be widely available, and not understanding the fare structure or being able to buy a bus ticket are the worst reasons for not using the service.

In my view, and in the Government’s view, the provisions in this Bill that allow local transport authorities a choice of enhanced partnerships or franchising, or even their own bus companies, will enable local transport authorities to look at wider retailing. Of course, the ultimate aim is not to sell bus tickets at all but for people to use credit cards or bank cards directly as means of payment. We want the bus industry and bus services to move towards that, and I believe that this Bill will facilitate it.

Amendment 77 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, looks for a review of the English national concessionary travel scheme. The Government want everybody who needs it to have access to public transport and are committed to improving the system. The English national concessionary travel scheme costs about £700 million annually, and any changes to the statutory obligations, such as the hours in which the pass can be used being extended, would need to be carefully considered. As I said to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, on a previous occasion in the Chamber, the Government are not considering changes to the scheme at the moment.

However, local authorities in England already have the power to offer concessions in addition to their statutory obligations. We see this in London, where individuals aged 60 and over are eligible for the 60+ Oyster card, and similar schemes already exist in other parts of the country, where local authorities have chosen to provide specific support to their communities through offers that go beyond their statutory obligation. That ability for local transport authorities will continue, and no part of this Bill will restrict it. A review into the English national concessionary travel scheme concluded in 2024, and my department is currently considering the next steps.

Amendment 79 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, would require the Secretary of State to review the impact of making buses free for children. The Government remain committed to exploring targeted solutions that deliver value for money to taxpayers while ensuring affordable bus travel for those who need it most, particularly young people. Bus operators can choose to offer concessions to children and young people. In fact, youth concessions are currently offered by at least one commercial bus operator in 73 out of the 85 local authority areas in England outside London. Local authorities also have powers to introduce concessions or discounts for young people. Since buses are local and the Government are committed to devolution, that is where we believe that such choices should be made in respect of free and reduced-rate travel for children.

Finally, I note the observations by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, about demanding or wanting reports following my noble friend Lord Snape’s helpful intervention. This Bill has been carefully thought through. The first requirement when it becomes an Act of Parliament will be that it works for local authorities, communities and bus passengers. No doubt there will be reports in due course but, frankly, I am not looking for any of them to be carried out now or in the immediate future because, as my noble friend observed, our efforts ought to be concentrated on running the bus service better rather than writing reports about why it does not work.

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[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

This group of amendments is really important, because training is an essential part of this new move to different models for providing bus services across the country. I particularly wanted to highlight the important amendment from my noble friend Lady Pinnock, because local transport authorities will be taking on significant new powers. We must not underestimate that, and it will be vital that their staff, stakeholders and members who sit on the authorities have a comprehensive training package, so they understand the legislation, framework and landscape—and accessibility and what that truly means, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, rightly highlighted. I liken this to thinking about planning and licensing requirements and what has transformed local government over the last couple of decades in terms of training and the quality of decision-making in that space: we need to look at this in a similar way. I really hope the Minister will respond positively to these amendments.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to those who have spoken in this short debate. I have great sympathy with what the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, said, as she knows. We will support her in her continuing campaign, and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond, to put the case on behalf of disabled people for proper consideration in relation to public transport services.

I was mildly tickled by the proposal from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. One of my deep concerns, which I have tried to express in as gentle a way as possible throughout this Committee, has been the adequacy and competence of local councillors to take on the role envisaged for them by this Bill. I had not imagined that a vice-chairman of the LGA should give such ringing endorsement to my concerns, to the point where she actually said that training should be mandated by statute for those who will take part in making those decisions. We are at one on this in our concern.

None the less, I am not entirely sure—here I suspect that I will sound a bit like the Minister, and I speak as a former local councillor—that the idea of a statutory training programme in this area would be appropriate. There is a false analogy with training for the exercise of planning and licensing functions, because those are almost invariably what are referred to as quasi-judicial functions that relate to individuals making applications relating to their property, business, premises or whatever. They need to be taken in an appropriate legal framework, rather than a political framework. It is appropriate that councillors are given training in that legal background where they are called on to make those decisions.

The sort of decisions that will be made here are not in that category, so I wonder whether this approach is necessary. In fact, even it were appropriate to have statutory training, I would not have training on the provisions of this Bill, which is what the amendment calls for but, rather, training of the sort that perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Snape, could provide: training in how to run a bus company and make the hard, crunchy decisions that you will be confronted with about how to manage your resources in a way that maximises your revenue while allowing you to provide as many, but not necessarily all, of the socially important services that you would like to provide. Those are the hard, crunchy things that people will need to be trained in, rather than understanding the legal background provided by this Bill.

In a way, I am delighted to find myself holding hands with the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on this topic, but I am not sure that I can support her on the wording of this amendment.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I will address Amendments 54 and 55 together. I listened carefully, as I hope that I always do, to the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, who talked about her real experience of travelling by bus. Anything less than 100% accessibility is unacceptable, and I completely agree with her.

The Government are determined that power over local bus services is put back in the hands of local leaders across England. That is why the department recently allocated over £700 million of bus grant for local transport authorities in 2025-26 by formula. Funding for bus services is also provided through the local government finance settlement. In fact, specifically, the 2025-26 funding included money for additional officer capability, for either additional officers or help equivalent to additional officers, to help each local transport authority in the choices that this Bill will give them.

The Government have also established the Bus Centre of Excellence, which I am sure we will continue to return to. Work is also under way to provide even more active support to local transport authorities that wish to explore franchising. I take this opportunity to make noble Lords aware of the Government’s plans to pilot different franchising models particularly suited to more rural areas. This funding, along with potential local transport authority bus funding in future financial years, is available to support implementation of the Bill’s measures.

It is, of course, wholly reasonable to expect the people who deliver policies and support services that help disabled people to understand their legal rights, needs and expectations. This afternoon, we will come on to the primary training needs of bus drivers, who are the visible front line of the bus service. The Government are clearly committed to helping authorities deliver the service improvements that we all want to see, whether it is through tailored assistance, the additional funding to which I have referred or the Bus Centre of Excellence.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, with his amendments, the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, has opened up one of the most important and least discussed areas to do with bus operations in a way that presents many of us who have experience of responsibility, one way or another, for bus services—in my case, a non-executive responsibility for a number of years—with real challenges and difficulty. The question we must ask ourselves is whether bus operators have the right mentality about safety. I say that in the light of what has been achieved in the construction industry, for example, over the past 20 years, where a focus on zero accidents and injuries has transformed the way of working. Of course, zero is never quite achieved, but very close to zero is now achieved on construction sites. A deliberate programme and a deliberate change in mentality has brought that about. On the railways, there is a strong focus on that mentality, and I wonder whether it exists on the buses: are we, in fact, way out of date in our attitudes towards safety?

I want to mention that I have just become an officer of the newly reconstituted APPG on Women in Transport. The relevance is that many of these issues to do with safety are women’s issues. There is the obvious question of violence against women and girls on buses; the APPG will look at that, but there is the broader issue of safety in general. I do not have up-to-date statistics, but it used to be the case, admittedly some years ago, that a very large percentage of women over the age of 65 presenting at A&E were there because they had suffered an injury inside a bus—not from a bus collision but inside a bus, very often because of aggressive or inappropriate braking on modern buses, which have very sharp brakes. The safety regulators, of course, think, “Yes, we must have the sharpest and most modern brakes, just as for a motor car”, but in a motor car you are sitting down and strapped in, whereas on a bus you are frequently standing up, because buses are designed to carry standing passengers. Sharp braking results in people falling over. Very often, proportionally, it is elderly women who are falling over and being injured. Do we take proper account of that? Are we recording it? Are we thinking actively about what we should do about it? The situation has not improved in the 20 years or so that I have been making this point about elderly women inside buses.

Then there is the question, which is very pertinent to the Bill, of the way in which franchise contracts operate. My experience is somewhat out of date, but it is a London-based experience where franchising is used, and to some extent the London model is the basis for the Bill and is being rolled out elsewhere. The emphasis in the contracts is on keeping to the timetable, and that is very difficult in urban areas because of congestion and unpredictable events, including roadworks and so forth. Very often, drivers are under pressure—they have a clock and are in direct communication with their control—to make up time because gaps in the service have arisen, and they can do that only by going faster and braking more sharply. Quite apart from the potential effects on passengers inside the bus, which I have already mentioned, the risk of knocking into something, often with very serious effect if that something happens to be a human body walking in the street, is increased.

We are all here saying how wonderful it is—not all of us are saying it with the same level of enthusiasm, admittedly, but there are people in the Room saying how wonderful it is—that we are extending a franchise model, but the structure of the contract on which those franchises will be based needs to be looked at carefully in the light of safety considerations. We should all be very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, for bringing up this issue.

In relation to Amendment 60, I am not persuaded that we should have a new and separate statutory provision about working time in the Bill, when we already have quite extensive and elaborate working time legislation elsewhere. There is a lot to be said in favour of Amendments 58 and 59. I have a suspicion that they will reappear on Report; if they do, they will deserve very serious consideration indeed.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lady Pidgeon, for Amendment 58. It seeks to require local authorities to ensure that bus operators provide their drivers with access to the Confidential Incident Reporting and Analysis System, which I will refer to as CIRAS.

The Government are always concerned, as they should be, about any safety incidents in the bus sector, or indeed any other public transport sector. That is why a number of official routes exist to allow anyone to provide confidential, anonymous reporting on safety and standards in the sector, backed up by enforcement. Anyone may anonymously report a lack of safety or conformation to standards in the bus sector to the DVSA intelligence unit, which may use this information to investigate the situation, including by working with other government departments and agencies, as well as police forces.

Comprehensive standards bridge all aspects of bus operation, across the roadworthiness of vehicles, operation of services and driver standards. As I said, they are enforced by a number of organisations, principally the DVSA. The operators of the vehicles are licensed by the traffic commissioners, who consider non-compliance issues seriously and ensure that operators are effectively regulated. The judicial process of the traffic commissioners can and does result in depriving people of operators’ licences and depriving managers of their certificate to run bus operations.

CIRAS provides another route for employees to report concerns. Both Transport for London and Transport for Greater Manchester are members of CIRAS. Being able to report such concerns in a confidential manner is clearly important, and I would encourage employees of member organisations to consider using this service where appropriate. But CIRAS is a third-party service, and it would not be appropriate to include it within the scope of the Bill.

However, I did a bit of personal research on this, and I will say that if we are asking people to report bus safety issues to the DVSA intelligence unit, it would make a lot of sense for access to it to be freely available. When I looked at it, it was quite difficult to find, which is really unhelpful, so I commit that we will see what needs to be done to make sure that the route to report directly to the government agency responsible for safety on buses is as efficient and easy as possible.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for bringing forward Amendment 59. Road safety is a priority for the Government, of course, and we expect bus operators, as I hope I have just said, to adhere to the highest standards of safety. Buses are one of the safest modes of road transport in Great Britain, and my department remains committed to improving safety with appropriate vehicle construction standards and ensuring the safe operation of vehicles. As we have heard, franchising authorities report safety in detail, and I expect that a consequence of this Bill, as it enables other franchising authorities to be established, will be to enable them to report safety in a similar way to how London and Manchester already do. In effect, the franchising authority is taking responsibility for procuring and delivering a bus service.

In respect of operations that are not part of franchise bus services, we have heard this afternoon that this is carried out through the STATS19 framework, which relies on reports from the police. These reports are based on locations identified by geographical co-ordinates. This is a role that cannot be delegated to local transport authorities and ought to stay with the Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency because it relates to PSV operator licensing requirements. However, I note the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, in respect of accidents away from public roads, which I will go away and have a close look at. I am not familiar with that nuance, but it is clearly important. Trying to divide any sorts of accidents into fault and no fault is fraught with difficulty. In fact, it must be subjective, and therefore I am not sure that we would want to go down that road. I understand his point about recording accidents on public service vehicles wherever they occur, and I will go away and see what can be done about that.

Amendment 60 from the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, seeks to change long-established rules about daily driving time on regular bus services. There are two sorts of driving time rules: one for services that do not go beyond 50 kilometres and one for services that do. These daily limits are well and long established, and I think the gist of my conversation with the noble Lord was that he was looking for an ability for people to report scheduling requirements on bus drivers that make drivers feel that they are not safe. That is a matter that could well be drawn to the attention of the DVSA because it goes to the heart of the repute of the operator. I understand that there may well be drivers who feel that what they are being asked to do is potentially or actually unsafe. That goes back to the process that I have referred to and the ability to report it to either CIRAS, if the people responsible for the operation are members of it, or the DVSA if they are not. I note what he said about this amendment seeking to draw to our attention this important matter.

The noble Lords, Lord Hampton and Lord Moylan, talked about the timetable. No bus timetable in Britain should have any requirement for people to drive unsafely or exceed the speed limit. As a seasoned operator with some background in this, I say to them that very often, certainly in urban areas, what you are in fact looking for is not the timetable to be operated but the reliability of the bus service to be as good as it can be. My experience is that drivers should not feel under pressure to return to the timetable. In many cases, any substantial delay makes that impossible. The training given to bus drivers is about driving safely, having absolute regard to the safety of passengers and, in practice, maintaining the regularity of the service rather than the timetable.

If there are cases where drivers feel that they are being asked to drive unsafely, either by schedule or in practice, it is the reporting mechanism that we need to address because there are people trained in this stuff who can address those issues.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

With the Minister’s permission, I do not think that we are disagreeing and, therefore, I do not think that what he just said about timetables is quite the answer to my point. It may be my fault for expressing it in the way I did. I am sure that I talked about adhering to the timetable—I will look back at it—but he has cast it differently. He said that reliability—that is, the frequency between buses arriving—is what operators seek to maintain, but that is precisely what can lead to the sort of pressure on drivers where a controller says, “Hurry up because the gap between you and the bus ahead has got too large”. That is really what I was talking about and what I meant to express, although I used the language of timetabling.

The key question that the Minister will need to address is to what extent does the contract reward that behaviour? To what extent is reliability rewarded in the contract? In many cases, companies and people behave according to financial incentives. If your narrow margins as a bus operator or a franchise depend on maintaining certain levels of reliability and certain gaps between buses along the service, that is what you will be pushing your staff to do. It comes back to this question of what the contract says and what it rewards.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. Before I got to the railway, I spent most of my adult life trying to encourage people who control bus services not to rely on the timetable but to adhere to a regular frequency. Of course, the truth is that in most urban areas, once you have lost time, the chances of ever regaining it are, frankly, pretty small, and they are even smaller with the increasing use of speed limits of 20 miles per hour. I take the noble Lord’s point but, in the end, this is about people either being required to drive unsafely or believing that they are required to do so. It is certainly possible, and I have seen it done to encourage people to attempt to make time up but, in my experience over the 50 years I have been driving buses—now and again, more recently—it is very difficult to do so.

Let us go back to the safety aspect of this. Where the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, is going rightly concerns finding a way for bus drivers to express that they are being either expected to drive unsafely or encouraged to do it. I take his point about that very clearly. As I said before, there are all these requirements on franchised authorities, which will report on safety because they are procuring the service. CIRAS is available, where people have chosen to join that third-party organisation, but, where they have not done so, it is about making the route to complaining clearer and more available. I very much hope that that answers the noble Lord’s points. I will leave it there.

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[The Earl of Effingham (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 64 in my name. This amendment places a responsibility on local transport authorities to ensure that bus services remain accessible, not just through affordability but through the diversity of payment methods available. The reality is that different passengers have different preferences on how they want to pay. If we take rural areas, for example, we know that public transport services are often limited in these regions, and buses may be the only form of transport available. For many elderly residents in rural areas, cash is their preferred method of payment. If we remove cash payment options from bus services, we could unintentionally exclude a significant portion of the population, especially in rural and isolated areas where public transport is already sparse. This would not just inconvenience elderly passengers but severely restrict their ability to access essential services such as medical appointments, local shops and social support in the community. For these passengers, financial inclusion is about the ability to pay for their travel in a way that works for them. This amendment is not about one-size-fits-all solutions; it is about recognising that different passengers need different options. The elderly, the digitally excluded and those on lower incomes should be catered for in our transport policies. By ensuring that cash payments remain an option and that services remain affordable for all, we are creating a system that truly works for everyone, not just those who have the latest technology. I beg to move.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendments 71 and 72 in this group, with a slightly different angle on this interesting topic of payment, which has been raised by my noble friend Lord Effingham. Normally, I like to give the Government a good roasting, criticise them and explain why it is that I am so much further ahead in my ideas than they are. On this occasion, since I have tabled these amendments and made further inquiries, I am glad to say that this will be an easy ride for the Government because they are doing quite a lot on this already and things are going generally in the right direction.

My first amendment relates to the payment by concessionary fare holders, and the second relates to contactless payment. The two may seem to be roughly the same, but they are very distinct. Contactless payment using a bank card, debit card or credit card cannot be used by those who have concessionary rights to travel on the buses because, obviously, if you are going to use a card, that right has to be evidenced by some identifier.

Let me give an example: those who have a national bus pass will have a photo card of a distinctive style, with an English rose on it; I remember that that was an important feature when it was designed. It is a card of a distinctive style with your face on it, and you need it in order to demonstrate your right both to the bus driver, who probably takes no notice of what is on the card, and, certainly, to a revenue protection officer were they to board the bus and check. This cannot be done with a bank card. One therefore needs two types of technology involved, which I want to deal with separately.

In London, the system that was developed for concessionary fare holders was originally the system used for all contactless payment. This was the Oyster card technology, which is still used for concessionary card holders. That includes not just the elderly—the national bus pass people—but also those with freedom passes and young people who have free travel as well. That technology is used.

However, when the national bus pass was introduced—by Gordon Brown’s Government, as I recall—that technology was not used and the DfT preferred its own technology, which goes under the name of ITSO. TfL regarded it as rather clunky, but the fact is that TfL then had to fit all of its bus card readers with equipment that could read two separate technologies in order to read what is going on. This was a very foolish way of going about things. The purpose of Amendment 71 is to suggest that, as this matter develops, there should be a single system that is applicable to concessionary card holders.

Amendment 72 relates to contactless payment. Contactless payment is widely used in London and was promoted by TfL in collaboration with the banks. In fact, it is quite likely that the banks would never have taken the risk of introducing contactless payment into the country if it had not been for TfL turning up and saying, “We have 4 million transactions a day; if we were to get together, maybe we could make contactless work. It will de-risk it for the banks, to some extent, and will give us something even cheaper than the Oyster card system”. I mentioned it being cheaper.

We should bear in mind that the driver of this, from the bus operators’ perspective, is the cost of collection. The point I would make—I would never disagree with what my noble friend Lord Effingham says—is that inclusion is very important, but one has to remember that cash is expensive to collect. It is much less for electronic payments. Of course, you have to pay the banks, but TfL was quite lucky because it had a proposition for the banks, which meant, I think, that it could negotiate a very good deal with them in terms of what it paid per transaction. Certainly, it is much less than the cost of cash collection, or even of Oyster card operation. If you are an ordinary passenger on TfL services nowadays—not a concessionary fare holder—you must notice that all the advertising encourages you to use contactless and not to get an Oyster card at all. That is the direction in which everything is going.

Outside London, however, contactless payment is still rare. The reasons for this are partly that the different bus companies all have different back offices, and the system needs to work in such a way that it will work with all the different back offices. I am perhaps pre-empting what the Minister will say, but I am delighted to be able to say that I have had some very interesting and valuable conversations with Midlands Connect, which is the non-statutory transport body for the West Midlands and the east Midlands. On behalf of the Government, it is carrying out work to develop a system that would work with all the different back offices of the various different bus companies so that it is possible that, over time, we could have contactless payment on buses throughout the rest of the country. That would be very welcome. It would be useful if the Minister could say in his reply what the timetable for that is; how much resource the Government are putting into it; what level of priority they regard it as having; and how they will now work with the multiple LTAs up and down the country, which will be running the buses, to make sure that this is adopted in a coherent way.

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[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

The noble Earl, Lord Effingham, has raised some serious concerns and this group of amendments picks up a point raised at Second Reading by my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond. She described the ongoing situation with school bus services and pupils with special educational needs in North Yorkshire, and the terrible impact it is having on families and children. It is vital that bus services support children attending school and college, whether within their local authority area or further away, which is often the case with specialist education provision. This is an area of much concern. I hope the Minister is able to provide some assurance in response to this group of amendments.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I heartily endorse the comments made by my noble friend Lord Effingham and the support given by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. To be crystal clear, the fundamental issue is not the increase in national insurance rates as such, but the reduction in the threshold at which national insurance becomes payable.

Many of the people who drive special educational needs buses are part-time semi-volunteers. They may be working a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the afternoon, and their overall salary, as things currently stand, brings them in below the level at which national insurance contributions are payable. That is approximately £10,000 a year; I am using a very rough figure there, as I do not have the actual figures at hand. The Government’s proposal is a reduction to £5,000 a year of the point at which national insurance contributions become payable—again, an approximate figure. It is that reduction which brings these people within scope of national insurance contributions, which is potentially fatal to the operation of many of these services. They will simply not continue. The best that can be hoped for would be a more expensive service, after a lengthy period of retendering and disruption, in which maybe the same or maybe different operators are providing a more expensive service to the local education authority in many cases.

Separately, there is also the question of private schools and putting VAT on the bus services they provide, which would be bizarre because no other form of transport is subject to VAT, as far as I am aware. It is one of the consequences of the Government’s vindictive action against private schools. But the SEND issue is not simply about private schools; it is about the whole range of schools, and it is crucial that it is resolved soon.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

Before I address the amendments in this group in turn, I wish to say that I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Pidgeon and Lady Harris of Richmond—who raised her concerns at Second Reading—for raising the importance of home-to-school travel for children with special educational needs. Although this is not directly within my department, my officials continue to work with the Department for Education to understand the issues and how they are best addressed. No child should struggle to get to school because of a lack of suitable transport.

Your Lordships may already be aware that the Government are clear that the system for educating children with special educational needs and disability—SEND—requires reform. The Department for Education will work with families, schools, local authorities and other partners to deliver improvements so that children and young people can access the support that they deserve. It acknowledges that challenges in the SEND system extend to the arrangements for home-to-school travel and has committed to ensuring that more children can receive the support they need in a local mainstream school. This will mean fewer children needing to rely on long and complex journeys to access education.

Turning to Amendment 65, home-to-school transport is the responsibility of local authorities with education functions, not local transport authorities. For example, Transport for Greater Manchester is the local transport authority for the Greater Manchester region but responsibility for home-to-school travel rests with the 10 local councils within the region. The Education Act 1996 places a statutory duty on local authorities to arrange free home-to-school travel for eligible children. A child is eligible if they are of compulsory school age, attend their nearest suitable school and would not be able to walk there because of the distance, their special educational needs, a disability, a mobility problem, or because the route is not safe.

It is for local authorities to decide what travel arrangements they make for eligible children. For example, they might provide them with a pass for free travel on public transport or arrange a dedicated bus, minibus or taxi. However, to meet their duty, the travel that they arrange must be suitable for the needs of the child concerned. The Department for Education provides comprehensive statutory guidance to help local authorities meet this duty.

The Government already expect local transport authorities to take account of the needs of all people travelling, including children travelling to school. Effective collaboration between local transport authorities and local authorities delivering home-to-school transport may bring benefits, but it would not be appropriate to place a duty relating to home-to-school transport on local transport authorities when statutory responsibility for that service rests elsewhere. For these reasons, Amendment 65 is unnecessary.

Amendment 66 relates to children travelling outside their local authority boundary to access a suitable school place. The statutory duty that requires local authorities with education functions to arrange free travel for all eligible children applies regardless of whether a child’s school is outside the council’s boundary. Where a child with special educational needs has an education, health and care plan, the school named in that plan will almost always be considered to be their nearest suitable school for the purposes of assessing their eligibility for free travel. It is already commonplace for local authorities to arrange free travel. For this reason, this amendment is unnecessary.

Amendment 67 concerns the application of VAT to transport for pupils with special educational needs who attend private schools. These services may already be exempt from VAT; for example, passenger transport in a vehicle with 10 or more seats does not pay any VAT, and operating a vehicle that has been constructed or modified to cater for the special needs of people with disabilities may also not pay any VAT. The Government’s ambition is a state-funded school place for every child who wants one, whether they have special educational needs or not. The Department for Education’s reforms, which I have already mentioned, will deliver an inclusive mainstream system that meets the needs of as many children and young people as possible in their local community.

I also draw the noble Lord’s attention to the consultation on the national insurance contributions Bill, which says at paragraph 2.13:

“The policy intention is to only capture education services and vocational training supplied by a private school, or a ‘closely connected person’, and closely related boarding services. The government recognises that other goods and services ‘closely related’ to education, such as school meals, transport, and books and stationery, are integral to children accessing education. As a result, other ‘closely related’ goods and services other than boarding (i.e. goods and services that are provided by a private school for the direct use of their pupils and that are necessary for delivering the education to their pupils) will remain exempt from VAT”.


I therefore consider this amendment unnecessary.

Finally, Amendment 68 concerns the impact that the increase in employer national insurance contributions will have on bus services for children with special educational needs. The Government recognise that the increase to employer national insurance contribution will have a varying impact across sectors but had to make difficult decisions to help restore economic stability.

As I have remarked already, local authorities are responsible for arranging home-to-school travel and deliver this through a range of providers. Department for Education officials engage regularly with local authorities to understand the challenges that they face and will continue to monitor this situation. It is expected that private sector organisations that contract with local authorities will take the impact of national insurance changes into account, along with other changes to their cost base, in the usual way through contract negotiations.

My noble friend Lord Livermore, at Second Reading of the NIC Bill on 6 January, said in response to a question about NICs and special educational needs transport:

“The right reverend Prelate also asked about SEN transport. In the Budget, the Government announced £2 billion of new grant funding for local government in 2025-26. This includes £515 million to support councils with the increase in employer national insurance contributions, which covers special educational needs home-to-school transport schemes”.—[Official Report, 6/1/25; col. 601.]

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, does the noble Lord accept that that is true for special educational transport needs provided directly by local education authorities using their own employees but not for contracted services, which are very widely used?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. I was referring to support to local authorities for home-to-school transport schemes. I will take that away and come back to him with the clarification that he seeks in this respect. I can say that the Government do not expect the changes to national insurance to have a significant impact on home-to-school travel for children with special educational needs, so it would not be proportionate to conduct the assessment as the amendment suggests. I do not think that it is required.

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Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

70: After Clause 27, insert the following new Clause—
“Transfer of functions of Traffic Commissioners to the Department for Transport(1) The functions of the Traffic Commissioners established under the Public Passenger Vehicles Act 1981, in so far as they relate to buses, are transferred to the Secretary of State for Transport.(2) The Secretary of State may establish a dedicated division within the Department for Transport to carry out functions previously exercised by the Traffic Commissioners and transferred by subsection (1). (3) All references to the Traffic Commissioners in any relevant legislation, regulations, or guidance, in so far as they relate to buses, are to be construed as references to the Secretary of State or the dedicated division established under subsection (2).(4) The Secretary of State must, within 12 months of the commencement of this provision, publish a report outlining the structure, roles, and responsibilities of any division established under subsection (2).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment abolishes the role of Traffic Commissioners in so far as they relate to buses and transfers their functions to the Department for Transport. The Secretary of State will be responsible for implementing these functions through a dedicated division, ensuring streamlined and consistent governance.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I suppose you could say that this is a modestly frivolous proposal because I do not suppose for a moment that the Minister will agree to it, but I thought it would give us an opportunity to take a little excursion into the history and byways of English bus history and to consider how it is that institutions, once established, can take root in a fashion that means they are almost impossible to abolish. Indeed, they can even engender a degree of affection that means they become almost inbred in the national consciousness, not that there are many people outside the transport industry who are conscious of the traffic commissioners. It is worth bearing in mind that they arose in the bad old days of corporate capitalism and monopoly capitalism, which prevailed particularly in the 1920s when what Americans called trusts were thought of as the rational way of delivering goods and services in the private sector. We adopted that idea, creating monopolies wherever we possibly could in the private sector, unregulated monopolies in many cases, and encouraging them.

So it came to be that the thought that capitalism unbridled would produce reckless and wasteful competition arose in the bus industry nationally—or among those observing the bus industry—that it needed to be properly organised on a rational basis and that the way to do this would be to appoint an authority that would be able to decide who could run a bus, where they could run the bus and what fares they could charge. As this was a gentle form of English socialism, it was not a national authority but rather 12—I think it was 12— regional authorities in the shape of a traffic commissioner, whose job it was to do all this work and decide who could run a bus and where.

[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

I have seen the amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is not addressing it; he is giving us a history lesson. We had this in the football debate where we had 25 minutes of someone describing the difference between a badge and a crest. It was an excellent presentation on the fleur-de-lis and the history of football crests, but it served no purpose whatever towards the football Bill and, at the end, the amendment was withdrawn. I think that sometimes Members need to be mindful of the time and effort that other Members put into sitting in these Committees and should perhaps use a bit less frivolous description just to prolong the meeting. It is absolutely contrary to the spirit of how these Committees are supposed to work. To probe the Government is fair, but to go into a history lesson on the role of traffic commissioners is unacceptable.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

Well, that is a very serious rebuke on the part of the noble Lord, Lord Goddard. I nearly wilted and decided to curtail my speech as a result of that intervention, but I have found the strength to continue. I remind the noble Lord that there is no question of time being spun out here. We are in day three of a four-day Committee, and we are very likely to finish the Committee today. We are going at rapid speed, and any suggestion that any member of this Committee has been using the time to spin out the debate is preposterous and is denied by the facts, so I will return to what I was saying.

This was the purpose of the traffic commissioners; they were set up for that purpose. So we come to 1985. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, considers 1985 an historical date or one that is part of the modern and contemporary world; for me, it is fairly contemporary, but I would not want to comment on the noble Lord’s age or experience of these matters. Of course, in 1985, all those functions in relation to buses were taken away from the traffic commissioners. By then—this is important—they had acquired functions in relation to the freight industry, as well as certain safety functions on top of that, so there was a reason for continuing the traffic commissioners then.

The noble Lord, Lord Goddard, will have noted, in his careful scrutiny of my amendment, as will have other noble Lords, that it refers only to the bus functions of the traffic commissioners. There is nothing here that would abolish them entirely. That is a pity, in my view, but I was advised by the Public Bill Office that an attempt to abolish them entirely would be outside the scope of the Bill.

The commissioners survived 1985, although there was really very little need for them. The Government are returning to a sort of 1920s view of how buses should be run in the Bill before us, but not giving the same functions back to the traffic commissioners. The decisions about where the routes should run, who should have a special licence and what the fares should be will in effect fall to the local transport authority, not the traffic commissioners, but they are to continue. Their functions include enforcement on safety matters, yet their budget for that is derisory and, effectively, there is very little enforcement. A lot of that work is done, in relation to freight at least, by the DVSA and not by the traffic commissioners.

Generally, it would be a good time to have a bit of a clear out of the bureaucracy that encrusts our modern society. I would like to see the traffic commissioners go entirely and what functions they have transferred to the Department for Transport, but the proposal today, for scope reasons, as I said, is slightly more modest. I do not expect the Minister to accept it, but it is a proposal that those of us here in Committee with a slightly more revolutionary spirit—I am sorry that does not include the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, or maybe it does; we shall hear when he comes to speak—should embrace to see some real change, at last, at the seat of government.

[The Earl of Effingham (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I might briefly address one of the suggestions of the noble Lord, Lord Goddard. I was present in the Chamber, as I frequently am, during the Football Governance Bill. I appreciate that he might not be that interested in the difference between the crests and the arms, but the College of Arms is run by my noble kinsman His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, and I can tell him that the argument put forward as between crest and arms is relevant and has implications. It is important to realise that. He may well want to look into it; I am happy to explain to him why it is important, if he is interested.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, the imminence of the recess suggests to me that I should not challenge the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, in his knowledge of the history of the traffic commissioners, but I will do that over a drink some time. I am less interested in the development of the Road Traffic Act 1930, or indeed the Transport Act 1985, than I am in the future of the bus service in the 2020s.

Traffic commissioners play an important and strategic role in the transport sector and, these days—principally but not wholly—in road use safety. I certainly refute completely any suggestion that there is an absence of enforcement; the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency does that. Traffic commissioners are an admirably economic and cost-effective way of dispensing justice to bus operators and bus drivers—those who are licensed to provide these important and, indeed, safe services—in a way that is widely celebrated in the industry and regarded as far more effective than any other solution. Indeed, the independent review of the traffic commissioner function undertaken by the Ministry of Justice, published in May 2023, found that

“the Traffic Commissioner function generally operates effectively”

and noted a strong level of support from the industry for functions continuing to sit with the traffic commissioner. The truth is that for a regulatory arrangement to be so widely celebrated by the industry it regulates is something to be celebrated, rather than abolished.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, is the Minister not rather concerned that the regulator is so widely celebrated by the industry it regulates?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

One of the reasons why is because it is not in the industry’s interest to have poor-quality operations competing with it; that is true in respect of both the goods sector and the passenger transport sector. When the traffic commissioners take enforcement action, including depriving drivers or operators of their licences or curtailing them, it is widely celebrated by those operators who do take account of the law and operate safely. That is what is important.

On our earlier discussion about the safety of bus operations and bus drivers, finding a mechanism that is effective for disciplining those drivers and operators who transgress the law—sometimes with no intention of complying with it—is very effective. I encourage noble Lords to consider the alternative mechanism of taking taxi drivers in front of magistrates’ courts, which are often found by everybody looking at the actions of the magistrates to be excessively lenient and persuaded by drivers’ explanations of their behaviour that would never pass muster with the traffic commissioner. It is a very important judicial function, and the commissioners need to be supported.

Returning to the Bill, your Lordships will have noticed that some limited changes are proposed to the functions of the commissioners. These include changes to services operating under service permits with enfranchised areas and powers to act against bus operators who breach the mandatory training requirement. The Bill is about empowering local leaders to take decisions on how best to run bus services in their areas. The presence of traffic commissioners across the regions of England—and, for that matter, Scotland and Wales—is complementary to this Bill’s objectives. They are well placed to use local knowledge to take the decisions they do in the execution of their powers, and I certainly do not believe that the noble Lord has made any case for change in the way that this amendment suggests.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 70 withdrawn.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th February 2025 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

11: Clause 11, page 8, line 2, at end insert—
“(1A) A franchising authority may not make a direct award of a public service contract under this regulation until it has conducted an evaluation of the operator’s previous performance in meeting accessibility targets, including specific improvements to service accessibility for disabled passengers.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that franchising authorities evaluate the incumbent operator’s past performance on accessibility metrics, including improvements for disabled passengers, before granting a direct award.

[A noble Lord]

Hear, hear!

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

Despite that enthusiastic welcome, and despite the fact that it is normally a great privilege to speak first to any group of amendments being debated in Committee, I am fairly inadequate in opening this group, given that many noble Lords who wish to speak have direct experience of issues to do with disability and access to the transport system. Consequently, if noble Lords do not object, I intend to speak briefly to the two amendments in this group in my name, and I will then take the opportunity to respond later to remarks made by others who have amendments in this group.

Amendment 11 is about a condition that we propose should be placed on a local transport authority before making a direct award of a franchise, which it is allowed to do under the Bill. The direct award means that there will be no competition, no tendering of the franchise: it will be given to an incumbent operator, and perhaps even to an in-house bus company set up for the purpose, but without competition. There is considerable anxiety and concern about this proposal in the commercial sector generally, because of its non-competitive character. Our suggestion is that, where there is an incumbent operator whose services you can examine and there is a proposal to make a direct award, at the very least, there should be an additional condition whereby an evaluation has to be made of the services it provides to people who are disabled, of the need for accessibility targets, and of what specific improvements it might make to its existing services to meet accessibility targets. I very much hope that the Government will accept the amendment or look at something very similar to it. I look forward to hearing what they have to say.

Amendment 42 is also related to accessibility and fits into the broader picture of demand-responsive transport. When I said on Second Reading that the Bill has an old-fashioned, nostalgic air reminiscent of the Attlee Government, I instanced that it seemed to make no reference to demand-responsive transport, which many people feel is at least one of the ways we could provide a public transport network, especially in less populated areas. The Minister seemed to be affronted and said, in effect, that the Bill was full of references to demand-responsive transport. I could not find any, so I am trying to sneak at least one in here. The amendment says that the guidance the Government expect to issue under the Bill on bus infrastructure, stopping infrastructure, stops and so on should at least look at demand-responsive bus services in meeting the needs of disabled bus users. I hope the Government will accept that argument, although I fully take the view that a larger rewriting of the Bill is required not simply on accessibility but to give it that reference to demand-responsive transport that the Minister thinks is there but I think is absent.

Those are the two amendments I wish to mention at the moment. I look forward to hearing what other noble Lords have to say, and I will respond to their amendments later, on behalf of the Official Opposition. I beg to move.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Moylan. I will speak to Amendments 35 to 39, 43, 45A and 79A, in my name. I thank the noble Lords who have countersigned my amendments. I also support all the amendments in the name of my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and have signed them to that effect, but will leave their introduction to her in due course.

Amendments 35 to 39 are on floating bus stops. It seems only right and proper to start by answering the question, “What are floating bus stops?” In essence, where a blind person, wheelchair user or, in fact, anybody has to cross a cycle lane that is part of the pavement to get to the bus, or has to cross part of the carriageway to get to an island representing a bus stop some way into that carriageway, those are floating bus stops. In reality, they are dangerous and discriminatory—a disaster for inclusion and accessibility, not just for blind people, wheelchair users and disabled people but for all users: parents with toddlers in pushchairs and prams, older people and younger people. In fact, anyone who crosses a live cycle lane takes their life in their hands, with not just pedal cycles but e-bikes and delivery bikes going in both directions, often at speeds of 20 mph and above.

So-called floating bus stops were born to fail, built to fail and bound to fail. Why? Tragically, they are predicated on a simplistic solution to a relatively complex issue. They fail on “inclusive by design”, on “nothing about us, without us” and on any concept of accessibility for all road users.

My amendments suggest that the Bill include the concept of inclusive by design. Without it, how can we have anything in this country that is worthy of the title “public transport”? If we continue to have floating bus stops, we will have transport for some of the people some of the time, which is transport for some of the people none of the time. That cannot be the society, communities and transport system we want in 21st-century Britain.

Similarly, there is an even more unfortunate concept at the heart of so-called floating bus stops. It is the sense that, because of this planning folly of a change, a piece of the public realm that was previously accessible and could be used independently, not just by disabled people but by all people, is no longer accessible and can no longer be used independently and safely.

I suggest in further amendments that we should look at issues of accessibility, wayfinding, advice and audio and visual signals around bus stops. I suggest that the guidance principles set out currently at Clause 22 need significant strengthening to the extent that there need to be cardinal principles in the Bill, not least that the bus must be able to pull up to the kerb—not the kerb at the side of a cycle lane but the kerb of the pavement—and that users need to be able to access the bus from, and alight it to, the pavement without having to cross any cycle lane.

I suggest that we need to have proper, meaningful and ongoing consultation around these so-called floating bus stops. Will the Minister say what happened to the consultation around LTN 1/20? How can we have these pieces of public realm imposed on us without effective, meaningful consultation, not least with DPTAC, organisations of and for disabled people, disabled people and all citizens who rightly have an interest in this matter?

In Amendment 45A, I suggest that on the passage of the Bill we have a moratorium on all new so-called floating bus stops and a review and a refit programme of all existing unsafe, non-inclusive sites. We need a retrofit within a year of the passage of the Bill because floating bus stops are not fit for purpose, not fit for inclusive by design and not fit to be part of a public transport system.

Finally, in Amendment 79A, I suggest that all buses up and down the country have meaningful audiovisual announcements on board within 12 months of the passage of the Bill. Yes, this is a question of accessibility and, yes, this is a question of inclusion, but more than that the great concept underpinning all this is that when you make a change that, on the face of it, is seemingly presented as just for disabled people, everyone benefits. From tourists to people new to an area, audiovisual announcements benefit everyone. I very much look forward to this debate and to the Minister’s response in due course.

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[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her intervention, and I will certainly write to her on that basis.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, inspired by the Minister, I shall be brief. Much as I expected, there were many valuable insights in this debate, particularly from public transport users who are disabled. We all learned a great deal from what was said, although, for many of us, very little of it was new because we have heard it before—though we are not always hearing sufficient progress in response.

That meant it was all the more disappointing that the Minister, although he is known to be sympathetic to this agenda, responded to the debate by saying no to everything. He appears to be programmed by the department to say no to every amendment that is put forward. There is always an excuse why each amendment must be turned down. When we return to this Bill on Report, if amendments are put forward as they have been debated in this group, this side of the Committee will consider them very carefully for support. If my noble friend Lord Holmes puts forward amendments based on his current Amendments 38, 43 and 45A, the Official Opposition would certainly be there to support him.

There was a great deal of reference in the Minister’s speech to private meetings he is having with Members of your Lordships’ House and to the prospect of discussion and debate after the Bill is passed about statutory guidance. This will suit the Minister and the department, but we should say—I hope I can speak for every Member of the Committee—that we are here as Members of this House to hold the Government to account in this forum. If it is not possible for us to make progress with amendments in Committee, that is a further reason for saying that we will want them debated and passed on Report or even at Third Reading. Private meetings and promises of consideration when statutory guidance is produced are not enough. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 11 withdrawn.

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[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support Amendment 22 in the name of my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. I do so because, in simple terms, it seems logical and sensible to go to what we could describe as the Beeching bus routes. They obviously had sense and users at the time. It seems a logical place to stop, alight from the vehicle and consider how they could be brought back into being. When the Minister responds, will he agree that when considering the cost of not having such bus routes, that cost should be measured economically and also socially, environmentally and psychologically, not least the impact on the mental well-being of that local area?

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, in this group we are debating one of the principal means by which local transport authorities can intervene in existing provision in order to change it. They would change it by the use of socially necessary routes and networks. That potentially means that it has very powerful ripples in how the rest of the market operates.

I have a number of amendments in this group. In my Amendment 24, I take the opportunity to keep hammering away at demand-responsive transport as a potentially important way forward in trying to ensure that local transport authorities consider demand-responsive services, not simply fixed-route services, as means of meeting social necessity and social need. Again, this is an important point that is not mentioned elsewhere in the Bill, so I have inserted it here as a means of meeting social need, which it must be. Surely anyone who thinks about this for a moment must regard demand-responsive transport as simply being something that whoever drafted the Bill just forgot about. Anyone who understands transport and how it operates nowadays must realise that that has to have its place in the Bill, not least in relation to socially necessary routes.

My Amendment 25 considers a different angle and concerns competition in the market. How are the contracts for these socially necessary routes to be awarded, and to what extent will they effectively allow large operators to lever off existing resources to exclude smaller operators entering the market? No consideration is given to these market issues in the Bill. It is simply assumed that with the state in charge, everything will be absolutely fine. That might be so if you had a completely communist system where all the buses belonged to the Government and nobody was allowed to run a competing service, but that is not what we will have as a result of the Bill. We will have a mixed system, and the effects of the big beast, which is the state throwing itself around the room, on the rest of the market system need to be considered, and it seems that no thought has been given to them. This is one of the areas where those effects might be biggest.

My final amendment, Amendment 29, goes to the heart of the problem that this Bill presents us with, which is that socially necessary routes are possible only if somebody is going to pay for them, and there is no funding in this Bill. Of course, I would not expect a funding package to be in the Bill itself, nor am I proposing that one is inserted into it. My amendment does not do that, but it requires reports on the funding that is being made available for these socially necessary routes. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no promise of funding for this. The £1 billion that was allocated in the October Budget—£750 million to local authorities and £250 million directly to bus companies—is spent. A much larger amount is going to be needed if these provisions are going to have any real effect. Of course I know that a spending review is happening and that the Minister will not be able today to pre-empt it, but unless he addresses these issues head on and give some sense to the Committee and your Lordships’ House on Report that there is real money behind this, he is simply holding out a bogus prospectus to the public. That is why I have tabled Amendment 29, so that the Government would be under an obligation to report on the money that they are making available to support socially necessary services. I think that is the heart of the whole thing in this group, and I hope that the Minister has more to say about it than he was able to say at Second Reading.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak first to Amendments 26, 27 and 28, which have been tabled by the Government. A review of enhanced partnerships is under way and is due to conclude in the summer. The objective is to identify areas of improvement to deliver a better minimum standard of bus services across the country. Amendment 26 supports improvements to enhance partnerships designed to enable the enhanced partnership scheme to include a broader set of measures that are directed at improving services generally across the entire local area—for example, setting consistent reliability targets across the entire area rather than on specific routes.

Amendment 27 supports the improvement of enhanced partnerships and relates to situations where a local transport authority develops interventions, such as bus lanes and traffic light priority. Where these interventions result in direct and indirect savings to bus operators, it will now be possible for local transport authorities and operators to include measures in the enhanced partnership scheme requiring this additional revenue to be reinvested. This will support the delivery of the bus service improvement plan objectives and improvements for passengers and ensure that the reduction in operating costs is not entirely absorbed by bus operators as profit.

The Government’s final amendment in this group is Amendment 28. Most enhanced partnerships have developed a bespoke variation process through which they can make changes to the scheme rather than rely on the variation process in the Transport Act 2000. However, there may be circumstances where this bespoke mechanism is not working for everyone. This amendment therefore provides local transport authorities with very limited circumstances where they can utilise the statutory variation provisions instead of the bespoke variation mechanism in the EP scheme to make changes to their scheme.

The purpose of this amendment is to allow local transport authorities to make an application to the Secretary of State when an operator is acting unreasonably and has objected to a proposed variation that would be made under an existing bespoke variation mechanism in an EP scheme. If on application by the local transport authority the Secretary of State is satisfied that the variation cannot be made, due to unreasonable or obstructive behaviour by one or more operators, or that the variation would benefit the people using the local services, they can direct the parties to follow the statutory variation process instead. The measure is designed to provide some protection to local transport authorities to deal with deadlocks in partnership negotiations and to enable changes to local services that are in the best interests of the people who use them.

Amendment 21 would alter the definition of socially necessary local services in the Bill to explicitly include entities that have a healthcare or educational aspect. I reassure noble Lords that the definition of “socially necessary local services” includes areas outside large towns and cities and that it includes local services that enable passengers to access essential goods and services. As such, the definition already encapsulates access to healthcare and schools, but I shall look further at what the noble Baroness has said on this matter.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, supported by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for her Amendment 22, which looks back at services cancelled in the last 15 years to look at socially necessary services in the present and future. I recognise that there have been services recently discontinued that may be considered by a local transport authority as addressing the needs of some of the communities they serve. I shall take that away and look further at what we do in this respect.

Amendment 22A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, seeks to ensure that when a local transport authority provides a tendered service, it receives the same level of protection as a commercial service. On the assumption that the reference to tendered services refers to services subsidised by the local transport authority, these already receive the same level of protection as other commercial services under this measure. Clause 12 does not differentiate between a tendered service and one provided on a commercial basis. If a local service is considered to be a socially necessary local service, Clause 12 requires the local transport authority to list it in their enhanced partnership plans, irrespective of whether it is tendered or purely commercial. On this basis, the amendment is unnecessary.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, for Amendment 23. This would have the effect that, where a socially necessary local service has been cancelled, the local authority will step in to provide a service when another bus operator cannot be found. It also sets out the implementation steps once the local authority establishes a replacement service. I reassure the noble Baroness that under Clause 12 when an operator wishes to cancel or amend a service, they will need to consider alternatives to mitigate any adverse effects of changes to such services.

I point out that local transport authorities are already under a duty to secure public passenger transport services that they consider appropriate to meet the requirements of the area and which would not otherwise be met. This is likely to include socially necessary local services. Clause 12 should result in additional transparency by identifying the socially necessary local services in enhanced partnership areas. This will provide the Government with additional information to inform decision-making around funding for local bus services. Local transport authorities have the best understanding of the needs of their local communities. Any additional obligations introduced through legislation would place an undue burden on local authorities and undermine their independence.

I turn to Amendments 24, 25 and 29 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. Amendment 24 proposes that demand responsive bus services be specifically considered as a measure for mitigating the possible adverse effects caused by the cancellation of a socially necessary local service. I consider that such considerations should be left to the local transport authority. The Bill sets out that enhanced partnership schemes must include requirements that apply when a socially necessary local service is cancelled or materially altered. These must include consideration of alternative options to mitigate the effects of a cancellation. This will include how demand-responsive bus services could be deployed.

The purpose of Amendment 25 of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is to ensure that local transport authorities have regard to maintaining a competitive market. I believe this amendment to be unnecessary because there are existing legislative protections that will ensure that local transport authorities sufficiently consider the impact of their actions under this measure on the market. The decision about how to manage the local network rightly rests with the local transport authority. In making decisions around what measures to include in their enhanced partnership, local transport authorities will need to consider impacts on competition. Existing legislation also requires LTAs to consult with the Competition and Markets Authority when varying their enhanced partnership under the new clause. If the local transport authorities were to decide to set up a local authority-owned bus company or provide service subsidies to fill a service gap, there are wider legislative and regulatory frameworks that will apply and are sufficient.

--- Later in debate ---

Debate on whether Clause 18 should stand part of the Bill.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I move that Clause 18 do not stand part of the Bill. I also wish to move that Clause 19 do not stand part of the Bill and, with your Lordships’ permission, I will speak briefly to both clause stand part notices at the same time and once only.

Clauses 18 and 19 are concerned with information that is to be extracted from local transport authorities but also from bus operating companies. I am perfectly happy with the notion that we should try to have as much information in the public domain as possible, and of course I do not intend—as I think noble Lords will understand—that these clauses should disappear entirely. This is a probing amendment, so to speak, to try to find out exactly what the Government think they are doing in this regard. I will speak very briefly to them.

First, quite a lot of the information being sought here, not least on the costs of particular routes and the revenues per route, would be commercially sensitive and belong to a particular company. The fact that Clause 19 allows that to be published in the name of the company is significant. These companies may well be operating a route for a particular local transport authority and another route in an adjacent area, very close by, in an entirely commercial sense. The information sought of them can have real commercial consequences. Nothing here assures me that the Government are respecting companies’ entitlement to have their commercial information protected in what they propose.

There are some difficulties in requiring this information. Having had a long association with the board of Transport for London, I am trying to think of a bus route in London where TfL could produce its cost and the revenue from it just like that. That is not entirely how bus services operate normally. Perhaps revenues do, but costs come down to a lot of questions about allocations that can be highly contentious.

Quite apart from the difficulty of extracting this information, the main purpose in these two Motions that the clauses do not stand part of the Bill relates to the protection of commercial confidentiality, to which private companies are entitled. There are circumstances in which one can imagine private companies choosing not to bid because their existing business would be threatened by the information they would be required to produce about particular routes. It is important that the Government should be clear about their intentions, what they expect and how they will protect that information, before we proceed with these clauses as drafted.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

I was rather surprised to see these latest amendments, which seek to remove whole clauses from the Bill.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

They are probing.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

If I can continue without being heckled, I am assured that they are probing and that the noble Lord does not want to see these clauses completely removed. He has raised an interesting point about commercially sensitive data. As we know, in running a transport network, data and information are absolutely crucial and transparency is key. All this helps us improve services, so I will be interested to hear the Minister’s response, particularly around commercial sensitivity.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I will respond to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, on Clauses 18 and 19.

On Clause 18, there is currently no one single source of information for passengers about bus service registrations or similar information about services that operate outside traffic commissioner-administered areas. Information on local bus services is fragmented, and this clause seeks to improve this state of affairs. As such, it enables the Secretary of State to make regulations requiring franchising authorities to submit information about services operating in their areas. This information will be similar to that provided on the registration of a service with the traffic commissioner, and it will be provided to the Secretary of State.

Together with Clause 17, Clause 18 lays the groundwork for a new central database of registration information, bus open data and information about services operating outside traffic commissioner-administered areas. This will provide passengers with a single source of information about local services. It is important to clarify that this provision does not reinstate the requirement for franchised services to be registered with a traffic commissioner. Rather, it provides the power to require franchising authorities to provide information to the Secretary of State, thereby enabling its inclusion in the new central database.

In addition, Clause 18 broadens the categories of data that the Secretary of State may collect regarding local services and the vehicles used to operate them. This power extends to gathering information from franchising authorities concerning franchised services and allows the department to collect additional data aimed at improving transparency within the sector. It might be said that the clause would answer the earlier intervention from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, about whether all buses actually conform to the PSVAR regulations and, therefore, it would be useful in that respect, too.

Crucially, Clause 18 also empowers the Secretary of State to collect data that will support the monitoring of local service operator performance and assist in the effective exercise of ministerial functions. That might include, for example, information relating to the costs associated with operating a service and the number of staff involved in its operation. I hope that explanation is sufficient to allow the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, to withdraw his opposition to the inclusion of the clause.

On the noble Lord’s opposition to the inclusion of Clause 19, the clause works in tandem with Clause 18 to support greater public transparency, and thus accountability, over local bus services. While Clause 18, in part, provides for greater information collection going forward, Clause 19 ensures that equivalent historical information already held by the department can be published. The clause achieves this by amending the Statistics of Trade Act 1947 to insert two new sections to enable the publication of existing operator-level bus data. It also provides for the Secretary of State to give notice to industry prior to the publication of such data.

Section 9 of the Statistics of Trade Act requires the consent of individual undertakings before information identifying them can be published. The newly inserted Section 9B disapplies Section 9 of the 1947 Act in relation to information about relevant local services that has been collected under Section 1 of that Act from PSV operators’ licence holders, or their representatives. This disapplication applies during a qualifying period, beginning on 1 May 2015 and lasting until the day when this clause of the Bill comes into force. Disapplying the requirements in Section 9 will allow the department to publish operator-level information collected during the qualifying period, even in cases where consent cannot reasonably be obtained from the large number of individual operators concerned. That point is crucial. The requirement to obtain consent from each individual operator would result in inconsistent data provision. This, in turn, would mean some communities not having access to the same level of information about local bus services as others, or indeed equivalent information for all services within a single community.

The newly inserted Section 9C requires the Secretary of State to publish a notice specifying the information intended for publication at least 30 days in advance, and further details the locations where such notices must be published. These provisions will enable the timely and transparent publication of operator-level bus data, improving access to information while maintaining appropriate safeguards.

Although the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is of course right that in a commercial undertaking, this information might be considered commercially confidential, it is also essential for the local transport authority representing the users of these services to be able to access such information in order correctly to plan bus services in their areas, for the benefit of all the people who live there. That is the justification for this clause, so I hope he will accept it and withdraw his opposition to it.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I did not hear anything in what the Minister said that remotely addressed the question of commercial confidentiality. The practical effect of this Bill is likely to be that some areas, possibly quite few, take up franchising as an option, while others continue with enhanced bus partnerships. One or two may even set up a municipal bus company, although I doubt whether many will. The fact is that a great part of the bus services provided in this country will continue to be provided by private companies, very often on a commercial basis. The Government’s whole strategy depends on a healthy, prosperous, well-functioning private sector being able to continue. To treat it in this way, as if its commercial considerations were an afterthought, bodes very ill for the way the Government are approaching this topic.

[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

I think the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is missing the point slightly. We talk about who is running the buses; people who see the way that Bee Network buses are run in Greater Manchester will unlock the questions that the noble Lord is asking. How do we get to rural routes? How do we cover the distances to schools? How do we go where the privatised bus companies will not, because the profit is not there? Where do you find the money to fill those gaps to make those routes work?

If you bring the buses under your control, the profit that would go to big companies is reinvested. That then funds rural routes and routes to hospitals and schools and for the disadvantaged. It is a simple mathematical thing: instead of putting profits in the hands of shareholders, you put them in the hands of local authorities, which can then do exactly as the noble Lord wants, which is to run the buses profitably.

It is a myth—people have seen what has happened in Greater Manchester and will happen in Yorkshire and other areas—that a transport authority with very little vision will decide that it is easier to go its own way than to deliver what is clearly a better, more punctual service, with better public satisfaction and cheaper fares. Those are the benefits of going down the road that we have taken in Manchester, and I hope the Bill enables other transport authorities to partake of it.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I beg the Committee’s indulgence for a moment to respond to that magnificent expostulation of a classic Marxian view of the world. It is very hard to see how the noble Lord has found himself on the Liberal Democrat Benches when he believes that one has just to eliminate the profit for the surplus released to pay for everything you might want. The truth is that you need an awful lot of subsidy to run socially necessary services to places that have insufficient passengers to justify commercial services. Those subsidies are necessary, whether you release the modest profits that bus companies make or not.

Most of the country relies on private bus operators. Manchester is a special case because of the density of the population. We rely on private bus services and those companies need to flourish. The Government are not remotely thinking about their interests; they are an afterthought. It bodes very ill for the future of bus services in this country that the Government are so inconsiderate of them.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I feel compelled to respond to the last point.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

The noble Lord has not finished his speech yet.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I will finish it by feeling compelled to respond to the last two interventions. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred to his doubt that you could see the cost and revenue for each bus service in London; I beg to differ, because I was responsible for running the thing for 15 years. I absolutely assure him that we knew, to the nearest penny, the revenue and cost allocation for all the routes. That enabled us to provide a broadly acceptable service, in very different circumstances, over the considerably varied area of Greater London.

I also assure the noble Lord that that knowledge is collected by any responsible bus operator in the rest of Britain. The point is that it ought to be available to local transport authorities which are keen to offer comprehensive bus services in circumstances where a number of bus operators do so. Many of them are not competed against by others, because they cannot match their comprehensive standards. That means that the local transport authority does not have the information to understand what might be substituted in its place for communities that have a very poor service.

I defend both these clauses very strongly. I think good information about this is absolutely necessary. This is not about selling biscuits or buckets; it is about providing public services for people in this country who wish to go about their business and go to work, school, hospitals and other places.

--- Later in debate ---

Debate on whether Clause 24 should stand part of the Bill.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, at Second Reading I expressed very serious concerns about part of Clause 24. In opposing the clause standing part of the Bill, my approach has been not to rewrite what the Government have proposed in the Bill—and therefore to provide them with an alternative policy—but to ask them seriously to consider and explain their current policy as it stands in the Bill. To that extent, this is like my previous clause stand part probing notices. But, on this particular issue, it is very clear that we are likely to come back on Report with specific amendments to change the text of the Bill, unless we hear something that explains it more satisfactorily than it has been so far.

My understanding is that Clause 24 inserts into the Transport Act 2000 a new obligation on the holders of PSV operators’ licences in relation to training. I have no objection at all to the idea that there should be an obligation to train staff, and I have no objection to Clause 25, which has a similar sort of effect but relates to training about disability. All of that is to the good.

My specific concern is with subsection (2) of what would be new Section 144F in the Transport Act 2000, where the training requirement under consideration is specified as:

“the person has completed training the aim of which is to assist the person to identify, respond appropriately to and, where possible, prevent … criminal offences that would cause a victim or potential victim of the offence to fear for their personal safety”—

that, after all, is a large number of criminal offences—

“and … anti-social behaviour, within the meaning given by … the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003”.

The person to whom this is directed can be only the driver of the bus, as buses run with one person operating them almost exclusively in this country. So the driver of the bus is expected to be trained, and the public are encouraged to think that the driver of the bus will be trained, to a point where they can

“identify, respond appropriately to and, where possible, prevent … criminal offences … and … anti-social behaviour”.

That potentially places a burden on bus drivers that is wholly inappropriate, given their role and their salary, and given that they will almost certainly be on their own on that bus when something happens. Many of the incidents that one can easily envisage would be encompassed by this training would be incidents that, as I said at Second Reading, the Metropolitan Police Force or another police force would respond to with one, two or three uniformed officers. Yet the implication is that a bus driver on their own will be able to

“identify, respond appropriately to and, where possible, prevent … criminal offences … and … anti-social behaviour”.

The Minister well understands bus operations—that goes without saying—more perhaps than any other Minister who might come here would understand them, but he cannot seriously mean what it says in the Bill. It is possible that he will say, “Oh no, you must misunderstand—when we talk about training and identifying, that is all really so that the drivers know how to report it to the appropriate people”. They have radios and they can communicate to their higher operator and the police, and things like that—and that is the appropriate response that we would be talking about here. But that is not what the words say; they say “where possible, prevent”, which goes a great deal beyond simply telling a bus driver to operate responsibly and take note of what is going on.

I am utterly baffled by what the Government are considering here, how it would work in practice and how these words are appropriate in this Bill. Something should and could be included, I agree, about training drivers so that they can identify, respond to and take account of this sort of behaviour, which is sadly all too common on buses nowadays. But the words as they stand put bus drivers in a completely impossible position. Apart from anything else, it would make recruitment very difficult indeed.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

I have had conversations with bus operators and bus drivers, who are very worried about this issue. Bus drivers tell me that the very act of opening a door to walk out and face a passenger is seen as aggressive. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is absolutely correct on this one.

--- Later in debate ---

While it is possible to draw the wrong conclusions from this clause, the right conclusion is to have proper guidance about the right training so that all bus drivers can be properly equipped to know what they can do safely for themselves and others in these circumstances. There is such training available—I have had some—but it is not consistently available across the country, and this clause seeks to make it so.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

The Minister suggested that I had misunderstood the clause and then gave an explanation of it that sounds very reasonable—and one could probably go along with it. The reason why I have misunderstood the clause is, quite frankly, that it does not say in words in the Bill what the noble Lord said. For example, there is no consideration given to telling the driver to conduct himself safely. The words could be quite easily amended to express what the Minister said, which is what this particular paragraph does not do.

I hope that the Minister will feel able to indicate on Report either that the Government will table new wording that will express what he just said much better—I think that would be the better option—or that he would be willing to accept wording drafted by the Opposition that sought to do the same thing. It would be better if the Government came forward with their own wording. It cannot be accepted that this wording stands in the Bill when the interpretation of what it means is so very different from what might be called the natural language interpretation of what stands here.

Clause 24 agreed.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

47: Clause 27, page 29, line 36, at end insert—
“(4A) Local transport authorities must ensure that, in the implementation of this section—(a) the availability, affordability, and reliability of local passenger transport services are not adversely affected,(b) passengers in all areas, including rural and underserved regions, continue to have access to essential services, and(c) sufficient support is provided to bus operators to enable compliance with zero-emission requirements while maintaining service quality.(4B) Before implementing any changes to local service provision under this section, local transport authorities must—(a) assess the potential impact of such changes on passenger services, and(b) consult with operators, passenger groups, and other relevant stakeholders to ensure minimal disruption to service accessibility and affordability.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment places a duty on local transport authorities to ensure that the transition to zero-emission vehicles does not compromise passenger service availability, reliability, or affordability. It also requires LTAs to consult stakeholders and assess the impact of such changes.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, a small number of amendments here in my name relate to zero-emission buses. I am concerned that the requirement for them is being imposed with excessive harshness and cliff-edge characteristics upon the bus industry. Amendment 47A, which I will talk about first, creates a form of exemption—a continuation that local transport authorities can put in place, particularly for rural services and in locations where battery-powered buses would be inappropriate because the distance that the rural service is running might be more than it could sustain. Generally, it might be appropriate in some rural areas to continue running diesel or hybrid buses for a further period beyond the cut-off that the Government envisage. That would be a relaxation of the requirement and would be welcomed in many parts of the country.

Amendment 47 provides a similar consideration on a broader basis—again, I am not being excessively harsh about all this. Amendment 48A requires the Government to justify their policy on public health grounds by publishing data in relation to the sorts of improvements—particularly air-quality and noise-pollution improvements—that they expect to achieve, for the travelling public and local people, with the changes that they envisage in relation to net-zero buses.

It would be helpful if the Government could take an approach that was a little less ideological and more tailored to what might suit particular areas and populations. I beg to move.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

Amendment 48 is a small but important amendment picking up on a potential anomaly within the Bill. It is something that Baroness Randerson flagged with us before Christmas. The Bill is clear that it wants to see cleaner zero-emission buses providing bus services across the country, and that is something that I would have thought the majority of noble Lords would support. However, this requirement does not seem to cover mayoral combined authorities. This amendment, therefore, seeks clarification from the Government on whether the provisions of new Section 151A on zero-emissions vehicles also apply to mayoral combined authorities. If not, this amendment should be agreed to ensure that every authority is covered.

Transport is a significant contributor to pollution in the UK. In 2021, transport was responsible for producing 26% of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions, and the majority of those emissions come from road vehicles, which account for 91% of domestic transport emissions. Getting more cars off the road and more people using quality bus services is essential, as is ensuring that those bus services are as environmentally friendly and zero-emission as possible. I hope that the Minister can provide clarity in this area and put on record today clarification about the subsection at the bottom of page 29, which states:

“The date specified under subsection (2)(b) may not be before 1 January 2030”.


Those I have been talking to in the bus industry are concerned and I think are misunderstanding what is meant by this. Some clarity on the record would be helpful for all concerned.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, these amendments cover zero-emission buses, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, have rightly said. The restriction on the use of new non-zero emission buses will not take effect any earlier than 1 January 2030, but the clause places a restriction on the use only of new buses. The noble Baroness is right to raise this issue; I myself have heard some misapprehension about what this actually means. It is about new vehicles, and the flexibility to determine when to replace diesel buses with new electric buses will remain, because if the date were to be 1 January 2030, all vehicles in service on 31 December 2029 would be able to carry on in service.

I will shorten the speech I have been given because it replicates some arguments about the use of electric vehicles, but it is common ground between all those who have spoken on this issue today that the operation of zero-emission buses is a really good thing. I do not think we need a complete assessment from local transport authorities. The important point that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, made is that there are circumstances in which there can be some further exemptions. In fact, the Bill already provides for the Secretary of State exempting certain vehicle types or routes from the restriction. That is the proposed amendment to the Transport Act 2000, new Section 151A (3)(c), which states:

“The Secretary of State may by regulations … specify local services or descriptions of local service in relation to which subsection (1) does not apply”.


There is a considerable flexibility here, in particular the recognition that there may still be services where zero-emission buses at the date at which the Secretary of State sets may not for some reason be capable of operation. However, I hope the noble Lord recognises, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, does, that this is generally seeking to do the right thing in respect of air quality and local bus services.

Amendment 48, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, probes the scope of Clause 27. I understand and am sympathetic to the concerns she raises. The clause will apply to mayoral combined authorities but as drafted, it will not apply to franchised bus services within such areas. I offer assurance that the Government are actively looking into potential options to address this. I hope to return on Report with an update and, were I to need to speak to the noble Baroness, I hope she would be happy if I did so.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for his remarks, and I am glad he acknowledged that there are areas of concern. We may want to return to this, but for the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 47 withdrawn.

Passenger Standards Authority

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 11th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

We will see when the time comes whether the new passenger standards authority is set up in time to deal with that question, but I am glad the noble Lord raised the east coast main line timetable, because it is one of the justifications for having a guiding mind for the railway. Our nation invested over £4 billion in upgrading the east coast main line, and it has taken several years to achieve a situation where a timetable which is remotely acceptable to all the operators and passengers, even though it has detractions in some places, was capable of being put into effect. It is a startling exposition of the fact that there is no controlling mind that the person who in the end took the decision to put that timetable in was me.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, is the Minister persuaded that when the consultation document on the future of the railways is published, which I hear might even be this week, it will have a convincing explanation of how Great British Railways is going to reconcile the inherent conflict of interest that exists between its role as a passenger service operator on the one hand and its position as a strategic authority, allocating paths and resources to freight, open access operators and others, some of them in direct competition with it, on the other—or is that the issue that has been holding up its publication for so long?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right: I promised him it would be ready in December. I was advised by a colleague here that I did not say which December, of course, but, as I said, it is imminent. The question that he asks is germane in a mixed-use railway, and not a question unique to this network at all. It is a question which in various forms has been a question for all railway operators for as long as there has been freight, express passengers and so on. It is clear that a controlling mind will have to have some criteria to allocate access, and those criteria will have to form the basis of decision-making. It is also clear that because there are third parties on the railway, they should have a right of appeal. The document that I am referring to, which will be published imminently, will deliver a proposed solution to those issues.